IPv6 Traffic Volumes Are Low, But Nobody Knows How Low 231
netbuzz writes "As the June 8 World IPv6 Day experiment draws near, there is universal agreement that little IPv6 traffic is traversing the Internet at the moment. The event is designed in part to increase that volume. However, it will be difficult for Internet policymakers, engineers and the user community at large to tell how the upgrade to IPv6 is progressing because no one has accurate or comprehensive statistics about how much Internet traffic is IPv6 versus IPv4."
And in case you don't know much about IPv6 and why it matters, dave.io has kindly provided "a primer on the IPv6 transition: why it's cool, how to get started with it and what's changed."
ISP:s at fault (Score:4, Insightful)
Since the ISP:s don't want to offer IPv6 to their customers the traffic is a lot lower than it could have been.
Right now it's necessary to do tunneling to an access point for IPv6 and that's not convenient for the majority of the internet users.
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Router makers are just as at fault. Our ISP gave everyone a "mandatory" free upgrade to 16mbps last year with ADSL2+ routers (even though the one I already had can do 2+, it wouldn't get above 8mbps). They barely support IPv4 without crashing, forget v6.
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>>>Our ISP gave everyone a "mandatory" free upgrade to 16mbps last year with ADSL2+
You get 16 mbit/s over DSL? Really??? I'd always heard (mainly from /.) that dsl == slower and inferior compared than cable.
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Re:ISP:s at fault (Score:4, Informative)
ADSL 2+ can get to 24 Mbps theoretical, IIRC. VDSL can get to 100 Mbps+, but you have to be very close to the ISP. I believe cable can get those speeds over a longer distance.
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And by "very close", he means you live in the same room as the telephone companies switching equipement, and use special solid gold wires to connect the modem directly to the telco's switch.
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ADSL2+, which is the main version of the DSL technology used in most countries supports up to 24 Mbit downstream and up to 1 Mbit upstream (Annex A) or 2.5 Mbit upstream (Annex M). However, the speed you get is highly dependent on the length of your phone line - you have to be within a few hundred meters of the exchange to get the max speed. So it's luck of the draw depending on where you live in relationship to your telephone exchange.
Personally I am on a fairly long phone line of around 3.5 km which limit
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You can get great speeds over DSL (especially VDLS2), you just need to keep the loop length short (< 1km)
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Ack, didn't mean to post that yet.
Anyway, I can get 25 Mbps over DSL today, anywhere in the city (as opposed to either of the cable ISPs which only offer it in select areas), due to the phone company pouring a fair bit of money into cutting the loop length down to 900m maximum and investing in fibre-to-the-node, with fibre-to-the-premises coming soon. I'm pretty sure they could crank that up to 50Mbps whenever they wanted, but are probably holding that in reserve for business reasons so they can one-up the
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Depends on where you live. My max DSL rate is 3 down, 768 up because Qwest hasn't updated their switch to support anything faster. I'm hoping they do soon now that Comcast isn't the only choice (we recently got a WiMax network in the area). If they don't by the time my contract is up, I'm switching (if they offer static IPs, which has been my problem with many ISPs in the past, including Comcast, even though they now offers them).
Anyhow, comparing Comcast's speeds to DSL is not really an apples to apples co
Not a sports fan? Take down the dish (Score:2)
a star network will perform consistently at the same speed whereas a loop will tend to be slower at peak hours.
A star network with one upstream connection is limited by the speed of its upstream. As I understand it, DSL is just as shared as cable, just at a different point.
One of the reasons I left Comcast years ago (aside from no static IPs and their overpriced cable packages compared to DISH, especially for non-sports fans)
If you're not a sports fan, have you considered dropping DISH in favor of an Internet VOD service such as Hulu Plus or Netflix? How good are DISH's loyalty rewards that you speak of?
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It is inferior. I can get 30mbps with cable here.
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The reason is that the phone company owns the phone cables coming into a person's house, and the cable company owns the cable cable coming into a person's house. And the cable company isn't required to lease capacity to anybody else. Now with some areas having fiber those would have possibly a third set of wires connected potentially owned by a 3rd company.
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I'm not in the US and I don't consider Cable an ADSL as the same thing.
Do you even understand how the technology behind each option works?
Or on a lower level. Do you know the difference between a stardard phone cable and a coaxial cable and how that affects signal quality and available bandwidth?
Go read some books and come back later.
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Do you even understand how the technology behind each option works?
Or on a lower level. Do you know the difference between a stardard phone cable and a coaxial cable and how that affects signal quality and available bandwidth?
Do you?
10 Gbit/s networking is delivered on twisted pair cabling, not coaxial. Granted better quality cabling and with four pairs instead of just one. The limits of ADSL is more because of poor wire quality and long wire runs than any limits of twisted pair vs coaxial.
ADSL has the distinct quality that you are not on shared bandwidth. Cable might be able to go slighly higher but you have to share with your neighbors. Which might be why cable intense USA have all the ISPs implementing download limits while A
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Cable internet is delivered over the same run of "cable" that TV uses. DSL runs over phone lines. Not the same thing at all. I used to have cable before I moved and now I have FIOS, which is Verizon's (Bell Atlantic + GTE) fibre optic service brand. I've never had DSL, but since speed is dependent on proximity to the CO and degrades over distance due to signal attenuation, for the majority of people it's never going to be as fast as cable can be. However, cable is more or less a "shared" medium not far
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I have a Comcast business line at home and have the same problem. The SMC modem/router that you get is a festering pile of shit. Doesn't support v6 at all and needs to be rebooted at least once a week. My "core" Cisco router has a DOCSIS 2 port on it, but Comcast says that I can't use it on their business class line.
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If that doesn't work, call up Comcast and get them to upgrade your firmware. We had to bitch to the Comcast higher ups to get decent support on ours, and after about 6 weeks of being in lots of contact with the business tech team, they traced it down to a firmware bug and made SMC fix the problem.
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Tunneling isn't just inconvenient for the average user. What keeps me from doing IPv6 tunneling is an utter lack of clarity on the migration path from there. When my ISP finally does give me a 16-bit subnet in the v6 address space, I expect that I will have to go through all of that configuration again from the start and also end up spending days debugging the tiny bits of the tunneling configuration and software that didn't come out cleanly. It all sounds like a major hassle, and the only benefit is tha
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Well, to allay some of your concerns, AAAA DNS records will be returned over IPv4, so DNS should be exactly the same speed as it has always been (which isn't saying much, I agree...).
Now, tunnels vs native is a bit more of an issue. Hurricane Electric provide init scripts to set up/remove the tunnels, so when you get native IPv6 you just remove those scripts.
As for the level of service gain, that's a catch-22. There's no users because there's no services. There's no services because there's no users. This s
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Now, tunnels vs native is a bit more of an issue.
Tunnel means I've had the same /48 for many years. Darn near a decade now.
Native means every time I reboot my cablemodem I'll probably have a different /60 (or smaller?).
I might stay with a tunnel semi-permanently.
When tunnels go paid (Score:2)
I might stay with a tunnel semi-permanently.
Until IPv6 gets so widespread that people use tunnels more as anonymizers than as essential gateways. Then tunnels will likely become paid services instead of free services.
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Most ISPs should be assigning you a /60 or /64 or something. Mine currently dishes out a static /60 prefix if you connect via IPv6.
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Oh and to add to that, yeah don't bother with the tunnels. I just stayed on IPv4 until my ISP switched to full native IPv6 in the last few months. They had been offering 6to4 tunneling for a year or two before that but I didn't bother. Seemed easier just waiting and going directly to native IPv6. And no loss of speed etc. (in fact I swear it seems to do IPv6 DNS lookups slightly faster than over IPv4)
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I also haven't set up tunneling because it doesn't seem worth it right now. I place the blame for low IPv6 adoption squarely on the ISPs for not providing IPv6 addresses to all their customers. Doing that wouldn't interfere with current IPv4 configuration and in most situations would just work without any special configuration by customers. Perhaps one reason they're moving so slowly is they don't want to spend the money necessary to provide routers with decent IPv6 implementations. If I were really cynical
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> same websites at a slower speed (due to the tunnel)
I have a Hurricane Electric tunnel set up, and this is actually not always the case:
--- www.facebook.com ping statistics ---
10 packets transmitted, 10 received, 0% packet loss, time 9011ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 36.170/38.304/39.851/1.103 ms
--- www.v6.facebook.com ping statistics ---
10 packets transmitted, 10 received, 0% packet loss, time 9009ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 16.583/18.888/25.474/2.335 ms
That IPv6 route includes a hacky wifi hop that the IPv4 o
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It's not necessarily better. www.facebook.com is under high load, while www.v6.facebook.com has no load at all. That could easily account for the extra latency.
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What keeps me from doing IPv6 tunneling is an utter lack of clarity on the migration path from there. When my ISP finally does give me a 16-bit subnet in the v6 address space, I expect that I will have to go through all of that configuration again from the start and also end up spending days debugging the tiny bits of the tunneling configuration and software that didn't come out cleanly.
RFC 3068 [ietf.org] is ten years old, so assuming your router is not more than ten years obsolete setting up IPv6 should be practically automatic.
I enabled tunneling by clicking a button then selecting two drop-downs to pick 6to4 (RFC 3068) tunneling. When my ISP starts offering native IPv6, I'll deselect tunneling.
If it's more complicated than that, you ought to be asking yourself why you're using such awful router software.
Re:ISP:s at fault (Score:5, Funny)
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Yep. My ISP is Speakeasy in San Jose, CA. You would think they'd support IPv6 in the middle on Silicon Valley, but you'd be wrong. I've got a NetScreen capable of IPv6, but no way to use it without a tunnel. Are you listening Speakeasy?
And DNS caching (Score:2)
Lookup of AAAA records is abysmally slow right now for some reason. Maybe DNS servers are not caching the replies? Anyway, I disabled all IPv6 requests in my local DNS cache daemon (by immediately returning NXDOMAIN for all of them), and browsing became WAY faster. It's amazing how much time is wasted on IPv6 queries, even when you have no IPv6 connection, since glibc prefers IPv6 results whether you have one or not.
How shallow is the sea? (Score:2)
I finally upgraded my home equipment to at least support IPV6 the problem though is that my provider doesn't support it.
So I have the boat now I'm just waiting for the sea to fill up around me.
IPv6 Problems (Score:3)
Consumer Routers don't oar barely offer IPv6 support. My router supposedly does IPv6, except it doesn't. There are no upgrades to the firmware to support it. Comcast (my ISP) supposedly offers IPv6 support. I suspect the consumer router companies are selling IPv4 routers now when we run out of IPV4 addresses, in hopes of selling the "upgrade" to IPv6 in a year or two, as that can be the only reason why IPv6 support isn't offered.
Sad
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No, I'm talking about gear being sold RIGHT NOW. Most do not handle IPv6, and those that claim to (like mine) don't actually work right. Your average ARM processor can handle IPv6. IPv6 support should be standard right now, even on low end Routers.
I mean, when I can get a cheap laptop for $299, screen, harddrive, Ram, DVD, mic, cam, and keyboard and OS included, why can't someone figure out how to build a consumer router that supports IPv6 for less than $150. It isn't nearly as complicated.
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I'm using it (Score:5, Interesting)
A timely article - I just got full native IPv6 running for my home internet connection last week (dual stack, of course).
Works well - the DSL modem connects like usual and the ISP assigns you a dynamic IPv6 /64 for the PPP session (ie. the modem's public IPv6 address), a static /60 for your LAN (your router then dishes out IPs within this subnet to the machines on the network via prefix delegation), and of course your good old standard single IPv4 address.
My Linux, Win 7, Mac OSX machines, iPad and iPhone all had no issue correctly picking up their IPv6 address and using it. The only things on the home network that are still IPv4 only are my old D-link NAS and the Wii. Attempting to access something, IPv6 is tried first, and it that fails it'll fall back to IPv4. Most Google sites are IPv6 enabled it seems, though other than that, the vast majority of stuff I access is still IPv4 only at this stage.
It really is weird having every machine in the house with a unique, globally addressable IP again after all these years behind a single public address using NAT. No more port forwarding.
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It sounds like more trouble than it's worth at this point. I would be happy to have unique ip addresses so I no longer had to port forward to my apache and openssh server. But things are working fine at this point, so I'm not sure why I should put any more effort to reconfigure everything.
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Well I suppose it depends on how complex your setup is of course. But for me it was as simple as:
1.ISP announces that they now support native IPv6 for residential DSL customers. If you'd like to use it, and you have a modem/router that supports it, simply change your login name (in your modem/router) from username@ISP.net to username@ipv6.ISP.net
2. I had a modem/router that did support native IPv6, so I went into the router web interface, clicked the 'enable IPv6' box, changed the PPP username as requested,
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Hmm, now it sounds like it wouldn't be as much of a bother as I first thought. I haven't checked to see whether my router model or ISP supports it. Now I might be curious enough to find out. I only have one linux server and one domain, with no real traffic, but I am lazy, hehe.
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It really is weird having every machine in the house with a unique, globally addressable IP again after all these years behind a single public address using NAT. No more port forwarding.
You mean the Internet as designed isn't a pain to use? Who'd a thunk it?
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Yes this is definitely something to be aware of. However, from what I've seen, consumer routers that support IPv6 natively also have a built in stateful IPv6 firewall - turned on by default with generally sensible settings for a home user. Additionally, behind that you still have Windows firewall/Mac OS firewall etc on the end machine - again this is turned on by default in most OSes (Windows since XP SP2). Non-computer devices OTOH may be a concern (eg. your example of light switches), but again the router
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Not to mention that if you really don't want a particular device getting an IPv6 address, you can always just tell it not to have one/ignore IPv6 allocation in the network settings.
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ISPs normally provide a /48 or /60 or such, so you get all of your addresses with it. You can still have a firewall at the network exit; the only difference is that the destination addresses and ports don't get rewritten by NAT, but passed on verbatim.
Every host having a public address *is* a feature, since it removes the need for port forwarding.
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Hi,
I live in Australia. My ISP is Internode [on.net].
The modem/router I use is an FritzBox 7390 [fritzbox.com.au]. It's quite a new model ... however for the previous few years I was using a Billion 7404VNPX [billion.com] which also now supports IPv6 (via a recent firmware update).
Apologies for my inaccurate terminology re prefix delegation. I'm new to all this and not a particular expert in networking. The fact sheet from my ISP about IPv6 says, verbatim:
What will [connecting to the IPv6 trial] give me?
* Your existing
Classic chicken-and-egg (Score:2)
IPv6 is necessary. Most everyone agrees on that.
The trouble is, nobody wants to pay the cost of switching until enough of everybody else switches to make it worthwhile. So long as there's no significant IPv6 traffic to a website, there's no reason for the servers to make the effort to support IPv6. So long as there's no significant number of websites that support IPv6, there's no reason for ISPs to make the effort to support connecting to IPv6 websites and converting their users over to IPv6. In both cases,
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there's no reason for ISPs to make the effort to support ... converting their users over to IPv6.
Only DOCSIS 3 cablemodems are being manufactured. DOCSIS 3 requires ipv6 support. This is apparently the thin edge of the wedge, or the egg in the which came first the chicken or the egg, or whatever metaphor or analogy you'd like.
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Even if the cable modem supports it that doesn't mean the rest of the system will. Most home routers don't support IPv6 and while windows XP supports it it's disabled by default.
The key problem with IPv6 remains that you can't really deploy v6 only nodes until you have eliminated the v4 only nodes and in the meantime deploying a dual stack node offers no real benefit over deploying a v4 only node. Transition mecahnisms can help to an extent but 6to4 requires a public v4 IP on the system implementing the tra
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Even if the cable modem supports it that doesn't mean the rest of the system will.
Well if you get picky and define "support" as synonymous with "works", most ISPs don't "really support ipv4" either because the only support you'll ever get is "reboot yer router and/or reinstall windoze"
The key problem with IPv6 remains that you can't really deploy v6 only nodes until you have eliminated the v4 only nodes
Not so... I have some experimental ipv6 only boxes at home. Set up a caching web proxy (I use privoxy; many years ago, like a decade ago, squid didn't do ipv6). Oh and you need a ipv6 dns server on the lan, so if your BIND is version 8 or older (90s-ish era) then you need to upgrade it.
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I agree. Classic race to the bottom in the bad way. Seems many business are penny-wise and pound-foolish these days.
You see it all the time in telecom for some reason.
the whole OH NOEZ! We have to spend money on INFRASTRUCTURE!? I wanted a fat bonus this year! bullshit.
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using NAT, but eventually that won't work either
And I've got one guess on exactly where that road leads. The ISPs see the business opportunity there to sell "premium" accounts not behind NAT for anyone who wants to host anything at all. R.I.P. Peer-to-Peer.
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1) It will be a year or two before the transition happens. The guy I talked to has enough IP addresses to last two years (and he actually hands out static IPs to his customers).
2) It will be expensive for ISPs. The way they deal with it is by replacing all their old equipment.
3) There isn't going to be a rush to weird masquerading schemes, because doing that will require just as much new equ
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There is also an issue of many people not wanting to have everything addressable. This isnt because they are lazy, it is because they want it that way. I manage hundreds of servers, and maybe ten or tens that are exposed to the world. I know this can be blocked, but it is a lot easier to have my private little world which just doesnt work outside of its sandbox, and then set up NATs to the rest of the world to the specific machines that need to be exposed. This is the easiest explicit deny unless implicitly
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It doesn't have to be government mandate.
Seems like a very simple example of something that can be encouraged through the tax system.
1) Define a company as an ISP using a set of criteria that work for this purpose (something like, supplies network bandwidth and IP address/es to paying customers)
2) Increase their corporation tax by some amount proportional to the number if IP4 addresses they assign
3) Decrease their corporation tax by some amount proportional to the number of IP6 addresses they assign
They'll
The real reason why IPv6 traffic is low (Score:5, Insightful)
I know I am stating the obvious (Score:2)
Right now there is no market for ipv6 because no one is on it. But, no one is on it because there is no market for it, so dominant ISPs don't offer it.
It's a chicken-and-egg syndrome. The IPV4 crunch should move things along, you would think, but does your cable, DSL, or fibre "broadband" provider offer IPV6? Does your consumer router even support it? I've seen a lot of hasbro routers and even entry-level "enterprise" routers which still today do not offer IPV6 functionality. Plus, there is probably a lot o
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Plus, ipv4 is easy to manage; your average network engineer has IPs memorized for when things break, or at least a somewhat logical addressing scheme so it's super-easy to guess the IP of a specific component when DNS breaks or is inaccessible, to be able to log into the device and fix it.
So, you've got xxxx:xxxx:xxxx:/48 for your small business (I'm going with a small single-office business for this example's sake, if you have multiple offices you can probably just get a prefix per office and another one for your central server room and the backup server room). What you could do is something so deceptively simple as taking say, xxxx:xxxx:xxxx:1:/64 and putting your servers there with static IPs. So now the office gateway is xxxx:xxxx:xxxx:1::1, the primary DNS is xxxx:xxxx:xxxx:1::10, the s
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Plus, ipv4 is easy to manage; your average network engineer has IPs memorized for when things break, or at least a somewhat logical addressing scheme so it's super-easy to guess the IP of a specific component when DNS breaks or is inaccessible, to be able to log into the device and fix it. the dot-quads make things really easy, four integers with a max of three digits (people memorize numbers and spelling most easily when broken down into chunks of three or less) per integer.
I can agree with this part. Practically the sole reason I'm fearing the change is that I'll no longer be able to set up devices and connections easily. As it stands right now, I take one look at an IPv6 address, and it's enough to make me blanch and think "Holy hellbore, how am I going to remember that monstrosity of an address??".
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I can agree with this part. Practically the sole reason I'm fearing the change is that I'll no longer be able to set up devices and connections easily. As it stands right now, I take one look at an IPv6 address, and it's enough to make me blanch and think "Holy hellbore, how am I going to remember that monstrosity of an address??".
Can you memorize an ipv4 address and a credit card number?
Get yourself a /48, which is only 12 hex digits vs a CC which is 16 decimal digits, memorize it, and encode your ipv4 addrs in your ipv6 addrs as per this example:
ip addrs 10.1.1.10 on vlan 200 on blah:blah:blah/48 from your isp is ipv6 addrs:
blah:blah:blah:0200:0010:0001:0001:0010
This is the easy way to dual stack ipv4 and ipv6.
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I can agree with this part. Practically the sole reason I'm fearing the change is that I'll no longer be able to set up devices and connections easily. As it stands right now, I take one look at an IPv6 address, and it's enough to make me blanch and think "Holy hellbore, how am I going to remember that monstrosity of an address??".
That's the kind of thinking you and everyone else needs to unlearn. IP addresses aren't supposed to be memorized, especially not IPv6 ones. The fact that we deal with IPv4 addresses so much is evidence of limitations of our current system based on scarcity of addresses.
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Riiight, so when can we expect you bringing online the DNS-server that provides AAAAA-records for every single device on the planet so we don't have to deal with IP-addresses any more?
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Riiight, so when can we expect you bringing online the DNS-server that provides AAAAA-records for every single device on the planet so we don't have to deal with IP-addresses any more?
Do you surf web sites by typing in their IPv4 addresses now?
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No. Because those are handled by DNS-servers now. If you expect us not to bother with IPs in an age where every single device on the face of the Earth has its unique, globally routable address, you're going to have to give us a DNS that handles them all.
Even if I want to FTP to the PC in the other room from my laptop, I'd have to type the full v6 address (back to square minus one), a shorter NAT-ted-mangled address of some sort (back to square one), or a device name. As the addresses are globally routed, th
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I can agree with this part. Practically the sole reason I'm fearing the change is that I'll no longer be able to set up devices and connections easily. As it stands right now, I take one look at an IPv6 address, and it's enough to make me blanch and think "Holy hellbore, how am I going to remember that monstrosity of an address??".
Why the hell would you want to? We have this thing called DNS. I don't even memorize IP addresses on my home network.
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I have to: my router doesn't seem to handle local DNS, only DynDNS. Also, I use the Google DNS servers, but since I'm not an IT-professional, I don't know if that's significant (I imagine I could substitute the primary or secondary for my local DNS). And my home network is your nightmare due to retarded ISP restrictions and lack of trust in my Chinese-made ISP router.
Re:I know I am stating the obvious (Score:4, Insightful)
Plus, ipv4 is easy to manage; your average network engineer has IPs memorized for when things break, or at least a somewhat logical addressing scheme so it's super-easy to guess the IP of a specific component when DNS breaks or is inaccessible, to be able to log into the device and fix it. the dot-quads make things really easy, four integers with a max of three digits (people memorize numbers and spelling most easily when broken down into chunks of three or less) per integer.
You can make it as hard as you want to. It does not have to be difficult. I have a substantial network at home and my scheme is:
"My /48" : "the VLAN" : "host"
My /48 is pretty easy to remember after I type it in 50 billion times. Its just one number. I have no problem memorizing multiple CCs, SS#, phone #s, so memorizing my /48 prefix isn't very challenging. I will be very pissed when/if I ever get "native" ipv6 and lose my tunnel and my ISP gives me a new /48 via DHCP every week.
Anyway, the VLAN is encoded very simply, blah:0100:blah is the /64 for vlan 100. I could do something ridiculous and convert 100 decimal into 64 hex and then encode that as blah:0064:blah but that is a complete waste of time and brain cycles.
The host is also beyond simple. Take a wild guess what my static host address is for a router? How bout blah::1? If, as usual, I have multiple routers in a vlan they number up from ::1. Luckily I have less than 24 routers... can you guess why? My DNS server lives at blah::53 and web server at blah::80. Take a wild guess what address my ntp server lives at?
I only use static addresses for stuff that matters... pure clients just get whatever radvd gives out, much as I don't care what ipv4 address my dhcp server gives pure client machines.
Also, frankly, lets be honest here, the days of having to justify buying a dedicated $15000 sparcstation with 4 megs of ram to barely handle running BINDv4 over my thinnet coaxial ethernet are kinda long since over... I have no shortage of secondary/backup DNS servers, and I can't remember the last time I completely lost DNS ...
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(prefix):0ff1:cexxx:xxxx:xxxx isn't crazy. You've got more characters to use; make addresses more memorable. Also, if you know the MAC address and prefix, you could just calculate the auto-generated v6 address.
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Plus, ipv4 is easy to manage; your average network engineer has IPs memorized for when things break, or at least a somewhat logical addressing scheme so it's super-easy to guess the IP of a specific component when DNS breaks or is inaccessible, to be able to log into the device and fix it. the dot-quads make things really easy, four integers with a max of three digits (people memorize numbers and spelling most easily when broken down into chunks of three or less) per integer. It's going to require a lot of training, documenting, and large financial cost. It should have been done up front in 1998-1999 when the ipv6 spec was largely finalized, prototyped and tested, before broadband became truly mainstream. It would have been much cheaper to do the work as much of the Internet infrastructure was still being built, but it wasn't deemed profitable then because even right up to the dot-com bubble business analysts still insisted the Internet was just a fad. Now it's quite necessary, but ISPs don't want to do it because the expense could be immense.
There are reasons the cutover hasn't even been attempted yet. It's going to be costly in many ways.
IPv6 will be easier to manage when used properly, since manual address allocation and complex port forwarding rules won't be needed any more. We need to move away from typing addresses manually and toward things like multicast DNS anyway. There certainly will be a lot of training required since the old ways are so entrenched. The cost of the transition will only increase and ISPs that delay it are just digging their pits deeper. Since most corporations only seem to look at short term costs and benefits, I e
Manufacturers are lazy as hell.. (Score:2)
I bought a new wireless router earlier this year. I didn't even consider checking for IPv6 support. I just assumed no networking component today would be shipping without it. I mean, we've been reading "running out of IPv4 - switch to v6!" for what, a decade now? And we've been messing about with NAT and port forwarding due to limited IPs for even longer. It's not like they didn't know this was coming.
Needless to say, mentioned router did not include IPv6. But at least there's unofficial firmware for it tha
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Seems there aren't any (or at least none that anyone is willing to recommend).
Most of the suggestions are "get a Linksys and flash it with DD-WRT".
Which is fine for most of us here, but ain't no way 99.999% of home internet users will ever try that.
Nor should they have to.
IPv6 (Score:2)
Yeah, we're gonna have to do it eventually.
Yeah, it literally takes 10 minutes for anyone with a brain.
Yeah, there are ways for ISP's to even automate it and shield users from it (e.g. transparent tunnels so they carry on using IPv4 but IPV6 is the actual carrier).
Yeah, it lets you get rid of NAT (which was never really much of a problem).
But:
I did it. I went to the IPv6 test sites. They told me I was enabled. Ten minutes later, after not finding another IPv6 accessible website, I turned it off to save m
Re:IPv6 (Score:5, Informative)
http://banjo.employees.org/~dwing/aaaa-stats.html [employees.org]
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"save me having yet-another-avenue where someone could get onto my network if I'd made a mistake in the configuration"
I wonder which is safer, security through NAT or security through obscurity via a HUGE address range. Even if you misconfigured your firewall, it will take a VERY long time to scan a /64, or ever worse, a /48 for IPs.
A /48 has 1,208,925,819,614,629,174,706,176 IPs. A 100mbit connection can send a maximum of 195,312 64byte ping packets(probably a different size for IPv6). If you had 10,000 de
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Yeah, it lets you get rid of NAT (which was never really much of a problem).
But:
You've obviously never tried using a peer-to-peer protocol such as SIP or Bittorrent from behind a NAT. NAT has been a problem since it was invented and if we don't switch to IPv6 will continue to become worse as more layers of it are added.
Until then, it's like someone 40 years ago with a video phone showing "how cool" it is. Fabulous. But not much point until everyone else gets them too.
Video calling is poor metaphor for IPv6, which is an infrastructure upgrade rather than a new feature or application on an existing network. Again, you're missing the point that we must switch to IPv6 or experience increasingly difficult network configurations. Phone com
IPv6 is still hard to implement for home users (Score:3)
The problem is that ISPs and router makers have been dragging their feet over IPv6 for years - there was just no ROI in the short term for them. Rolling your own solution is doable, but doing it properly without ISP or router support is still quite tricky.
Now of course, as IPv4 running out becomes a concrete problem, it's cheaper and simpler to focus on deploying carrier grade NAT - i.e. multiple end-users sharing a single globally routable IPv4 address.
I do have IPv6 on my home network; I've got a dlink 825 flashed with openWRT as my primary router (linked to cheapie DSL modem with PPPoE) specifically so I could run the AICCU client for sixxs.net for my IPv6 tunnel on it. RADVD handles advertising the tunnel prefix to the home LAN, so all my PCs, VMs, laptops etc have IPv6 addresses using one /64 out of my allocated /48. I had to do it this way as I have a dynamic IPv4 address, and the handful of expensive routers that do support proper 6in4 tunnels generally only work if you have a fixed real IPv4 address.
I have a similar setup at work, but there it's just a linux box with the main fixed IP router forwarding the 6in4 packets to it.
The main use for this for me is to be able to connect direct over IPv6 to any of my machines at home (mostly my NAS or VMs), using SSH or RDP etc - I've just put the static IPv6 addresses into my external DNS for my own domain. Very handy if I want to test how one of our hosted services looks from outside the work network, or to queue up a download so it's ready when I get home. I even use it at home to connect to work; since the IPv6 takes a different (shorter) route, it's quite a bit lower latency than connecting to the same machine via IPv4 and VPN (my firewall allows such connections from and to work, but not the general outside world)
So it has its uses for a techie like me; but for the average home user? It's way way beyond their ability to setup. Even setting up a single machine with a dynamic IPv6 tunnel is too complex, and certainly using 6to4 or toredo or the like relies too much on having a nearby translation gateway, and they're still pretty thin on the ground leading to a pretty rubbish IPv6 connection.
I honestly think we're going to see a lot more carrier-grade NAT from ISPs - it's already happening for mobile devices - than we see major IPv6 rollouts in the near future. Of course, that will break even more than it already is P2P apps like skype, bittorrent, IM file transfer etc etc, and of course running your own IPv6 tunnel will be that much harder behind a double NAT firewall.
The embarrassing thing (Score:5, Interesting)
...The embarrassing thing is that Facebook, a site for doing social things that isn't about tech is available over IPv6, but Slashdot, which is all about tech still is not available over IPv6.
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www.facebook.com's AAAA record resolves to 2620:0:1cfe:face:b00c::b -- however, most folks can't resolve it. According to posts on the ipv6-ops mailing list, Facebook is still doing IPv6 in a limited testing phase, so they have DNS whitelisting enabled to avoid folks other than Hurricane Electric IPv6 testers getting the AAAA record while the IPv6 version of the site is still not quite there yet.
Presumably they'll turn off the whitelisting and let it resolve universally for IPv6 Day.
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http://www.v6.facebook.com/ [facebook.com]
they also have an alternate v6 site, but don't recall what it was.
Shaw sucks (Score:2)
Really... they suck.
Last time I called them about ipv6 availability, the guy at the other end of the phone proceeded to claim that the stories about ipv4 exhaustion are just 'the sky is falling' hype... that there is no shortage of ipv4 addresses, and there is no need to begin a transition to ipv6 imminently. He compared it to Y2K, saying how everybody was all panicked before it happened and how it turned out that it wasn't anything to be all concerned about (never mind the fact that the only real reaso
Thanks for the reminder (Score:2)
Question About Cable Routers (Score:2)
How can the average homeowner tell if their cable modem/router is IPv6 capable? Or, is this a non-issue?
I can ping6 the various computers on my home network that support v6, but currently cannot ping6 outside addresses. Hence, my question for those with the expertise to answer.
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Typically if the web interface of the router has IPv6 related options in it I imagine. Mine has a whopping great button 'enable IPv6'. When pressed, it makes a bunch of other options appear (e.g. method of obtaining IPv6 addresses from the ISP: prefix delegation, DHCPv6, manual assignment etc.)
Or I suppose if the manual or box the router came in mentions IPv6 support ;)
Re:Question About Cable Routers (Score:5, Insightful)
How can the average homeowner tell if their cable modem/router is IPv6 capable? Or, is this a non-issue?
WRT to cablemodems:
You can only run, eh, "8 megs" or so over a single downstream channel... If your local cableco is selling services running faster than that, they must be doing channel bonding to do it, which requires DOCSIS 3 link layer protocol, and DOCSIS 3 certification / licensing / whatever has mandatory ipv6 support. Also no one in China has manufactured a non DOCSIS 3 hardware compatible cablemodem for I would guess a couple years now. Does not exclude the possibility of your local cableco having a warehouse full of brand new, "old" DOCSIS 2 modems.
Most people "get the cablemodem for free from their provider". Its possible you live in an area were you own and pay for the modem, much like the DSL guys do. Assuming you purchased it, look for "DOCSIS 3 support" on the shipping box, or just google for your model cablemodem and "docsis3" etc.
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I will admit it depends on your local node size and the guts of your local PR flacks.
If you assume you've got maybe 800 passings, maybe 400 subs, and maybe 1 in 100 runs torrents all day at 8 megs each, thats 32 megs right there...
If you assume your local PR flacks are more honest than normal, then they'll say you'll probably only get "about 5 megs". If your PR flacks are ambitious, they'll quote the full downstream of a 256QAM which is 42.88 megs, even though no one will ever get it.
I stand by my quote, i
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Uh... you might look again. DOCSIS 2 can do 30 Mbit on a single downstream.
For 64-QAM yeah. For 256-QAM more like 40 megs on the same channel. Gonna need a clean plant with decent SNR to run 256-QAM but its quite possible.
I've never seen a node / CMTS DS that was only connected to one subscriber. I'm sure someone out there has.
Saying the total shared DS speed is 30 megs therefore I got "30 megs service" is kind of like saying my old dialup ISP had a T3 for us to share, so I had "45 megs dialup service"...
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How can the average homeowner tell if their cable modem/router is IPv6 capable? Or, is this a non-issue?
But, if I unplug my modem and take it over to my computer so I can type the model in, google doesn't work.
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mac has had IPv6 support since way before X.4 (Score:2)
Macs have had KAME since at least X.2 and I believe before. I don't know if it was in the GUI setup, but it definitely was in the file system. I set it up because I was trying to get my mac to talk to my work VPN, which used an IPsec protocol (and gee, IPv6 comes with IPsec!). I'm guessing it was there before X.2, possibly X.0, but I'm not going to pull out my X.0 disk to check. I left my previous ISP and was running IPv6 before Tiger was released and will support it again if my current ISP ever does suppor
It's sad... (Score:2)
IPv6 is the Microsoft Bob of the new Millennium. So, like Bob, let's drop it, keep Clippy and the Dog, and move on to IPv2000, to be followed by IPvXP, IPvVISTA (which we will all have to install, but downgrade to IPvXP), and IPv7.
That's a hell of a path from IPv6 to IPv7, but hey, what are you going to do? Install IPvBuntu?
IPv6 is all over BitTorrent (Score:2)
I have IPv6 through my ISP, Sonic.net. Whenever I use BitTorrent, I see plenty of IPv6 hosts. The reason is pretty obvious to me: if you're passing IPv6 through your home router, you have an externally-reachable IPv6 address ... but you may not have an externally-reachable IPv4 address thanks to your home router's NAT.
Presumably, this means that one incentive for home users getting IPv6 is to get a better-connected BitTorrent network. BitTorrent is pretty popular, but ISPs are never going to tell you "Get I
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I have IPv6 through my ISP, Sonic.net. Whenever I use BitTorrent, I see plenty of IPv6 hosts. The reason is pretty obvious to me: if you're passing IPv6 through your home router, you have an externally-reachable IPv6 address ... but you may not have an externally-reachable IPv4 address thanks to your home router's NAT.
Presumably, this means that one incentive for home users getting IPv6 is to get a better-connected BitTorrent network. BitTorrent is pretty popular, but ISPs are never going to tell you "Get IPv6 so you can download movies ... er, I mean, Ubuntu Live CDs! ... faster."
Although Bittorrent is one of the peer to peer protocols that benefits from getting rid of NAT, I think a bigger case can be made for VoIP ones like SIP and XMPP Jingle (Google Talk). The tricks people have had to resort to make them work through NATs are horrific and don't always work. I expect Skype has to do similar things, but it's all secret.
TFA is simply wrong (Score:2)
I'm sorry, but that's utterly wrong. There are people who are watching this stuff. One of them is Craig Labovitz, Chief Scientist at Arbor Networks [arbornetworks.com]. He authored a paper six months ago called Six Months, Six Providers, and IPv6 [monkey.org]. In it, he says that tunneled
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Oh, apparently TFA has a page 2.
I'd use ipv6... (Score:2)
... but my university network, which was touted as 'modern' doesn't even offer it. Of course, it does offer some rather obnoxious censoring since last September: what the FUCK did Google Labs ever do to Corvinus?
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Comcast is actually doing something right with IPv6. They've already started to roll out dual stack.
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Also, to all those who tout DNS as the savior for remembering complex IP(v6) addresses, consider this, router & firewall rules don't use DNS
So fix them.
logs record IPs not names,
Only for speed reasons. Look at software like analog, it resolves the hostnames when you do the reporting.
and when you roll out large amounts of servers or workstations and have to enter in the IPs manually, who wants to enter in a 128-bit hex address?
Read about stateless autoconfiguration. You don't have to enter IPv6 IP addresses into servers and workstations when you roll them out.