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Networking The Internet China Upgrades IT

After Launch Day: Taking Stock of IPv6 Adoption 244

darthcamaro writes "So how did World IPv6 Launch go? Surprisingly well, according to participants at the event. Google said it has seen 150% growth in IPv6 traffic, Facebook now has 27 million IPv6 users and Akamai is serving 100x more IPv6 traffic. But it's still a 'brocolli' technology. 'I've said in the past that IPv6 is a 'broccoli' technology,' Leslie Daigle, CTO of the Internet Society said. 'I still think it is a tech everybody knows it would be good if we ate more of it but nobody wants to eat it without the cheese sauce.'" Reader SmartAboutThings adds a few data points: "According to Google statistics, Romania leads the way with a 6.55% adoption rate, followed by France with 4.67%. Japan is on the third place so far with 1.57% but it seems here 'users still experience significant reliability or latency issues connecting to IPv6-enabled websites.' In the U.S. and China the users have noticed infrequent issues connecting to the new protocol, but still the adoption rate is 0.93% and 0.58%, respectively."
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After Launch Day: Taking Stock of IPv6 Adoption

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  • by X0563511 ( 793323 ) on Thursday June 07, 2012 @01:18PM (#40247417) Homepage Journal

    What a terrible metaphor. Everyone knows that IPv6 is closer to a Brussels Sprout.

    • That was true when people only used it once a year.

    • by Inda ( 580031 )
      What's with all this vegetable hate?

      And why ruin a good piece of broccoli with cheese sauce? Just boil it for a few minutes, and serve it while it's got a slight crunch. If you must add butter, only use half a teaspoon. Cheese sauce? Sounds fatty.

      IPv6 is more like a red double-decker bus.
      • by Bengie ( 1121981 )
        Boil it and kill lots of the nutrients?! Nah, just wash it off and nom nom nom. The fiber-ish stalks are surprisingly filling. I used to hate broccoli even a few years back, now I love it.
      • And why ruin a good piece of broccoli with cheese sauce? [..] Sounds fatty.

        It's true that broccoli tastes better when you're eating it with something saucy, but I've never heard of it being covered in cheese sauce in itself. Is someone confusing it with cauliflower and cauliflower cheese [slashdot.org]? (Article says this is a British dish, so maybe the Yanks eat broccoli with cheese instead, but I've never heard of that, and its article doesn't mention cheese).

        • by mcgrew ( 92797 ) *

          Yeah, they even sell frozen broccoli with the cheese already in it. Throw the bag in the microwave, nuke it, pour it into a bowl and you're done. Cauliflower's good with cheese, too.

    • It's a great term actually. Linux & OSS could be called the "broccoli technology" of Slashdot.
    • by Merk42 ( 1906718 )
      Broccoli and Brussels Sprouts are both cabbages anyway
    • by Lumpy ( 12016 )

      "What a terrible metaphor. Everyone knows that IPv6 is closer to a Brussels Sprout."

      Which is better with bacon instead of Cheese sauce.

      • by suutar ( 1860506 )
        All things are better with bacon. Well, all savory things. Some sweet things get dicey. But whipped cream will handle them.
  • by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 07, 2012 @01:25PM (#40247503)

    http://blogs.voxeo.com/speakingofstandards/2011/05/22/fun-with-ipv6-addresses-check-out-facebooks-aaaa-record-in-dns/

  • by BagOBones ( 574735 ) on Thursday June 07, 2012 @01:25PM (#40247523)

    On the consumer front only just recently did home WiFi routers start shipping or start getting IPv6 support, even then finding an ISP that will provision you is next to impossible.

    On the enterprise front gear has been labeled as IPv6 ready or compatible or even listed it as a feature for a long time. However if you work in security and have to implement policy control over content, you quickly see that the functionality is years behind when applied to IPv6 flows... At an enterprise level switching isn't easy without swamping out a lot of gear, or reducing expectations... IPv6 enabled deep inspection, and application layer inspection tools are only now becoming available, or only now becoming mature enough to roll out.

    • by imemyself ( 757318 ) on Thursday June 07, 2012 @01:34PM (#40247637)
      I definitely agree with the concerns about IPv6 in the enterprise. Sure, almost everything has had some IPv6 support for years, but the feature parity with IPv4 was not there. (For example maybe something supports OSPF / BGP with IPv4 but only static routes with IPv6...or you can reference address groups from within a IPv4 ACL but not from IPv6). Even today some vendors (*cough* Juniper on their EX switches *cough*) see IPv6 routing as "extra" feature that isn't available on the basic license level. This is unacceptable, and shows a complete disconnect between vendors and enterprises / service providers with respect to what's actually needed for real world IPv6 deployments.
      • I can forgive Juniper when compared to Cisco on the topic of licensing and complexity.

        Despite advancements for support at the device level the next major hurdle for large enterprise is the management tools and monitoring tools not fully supporting IPv6.

        It is really hard to manage a modern network without flow monitoring, snmp and syslog data from all systems. This is another area where you end up with a setback or compromise if you try and roll out right now.

      • by Melkman ( 82959 )

        I totally agree with the Juniper EX licensing issue. Why is there a difference between OSPF and OSPFv3 ? I could understand if an advanced license was needed for both or for none of them but the split is just awkward.

        • Out of the box you get access to a lot more (ipv4 features) than with Cisco without extra licensing, however you are right that the split is odd.

    • by Sycraft-fu ( 314770 ) on Thursday June 07, 2012 @02:27PM (#40248287)

      There can be a real difference between "Can do IPv6" and "Can do IPv6 with realistic traffic." Most high end Cisco gear, even older stuff could be updated to support IPv6. However the problem is that it is all in software, all on the rather small CPU. So sure it'll work if you have only a couple IPv6 flows, however if everything went IPv6 it'd fall over. You need support in the ASICs for it, and that means buying new hardware.

      Of course being high end it isn't so cheap. We upgraded all our stuff on campus to do IPv6 and it was millions to get all the hardware needed. Now we are large, but not compared to many ISPs. So it isn't so easy to just say "Oh buy a bunch of new equipment to replace the perfectly good stuff you already have."

      IPv6 is coming, slowly, but it isn't going to be a fast process and anyone who things people, ISPs, etc should "Just do it," hasn't spent any real time looking at what is involved.

    • by Hatta ( 162192 )

      On the consumer front only just recently did home WiFi routers start shipping or start getting IPv6 support, even then finding an ISP that will provision you is next to impossible.

      That's what custom firmware and 6 to 4 gateways are for.

      policy control over content, you quickly see that the functionality is years behind when applied to IPv6 flows

      That's a feature, not a bug.

  • nat routers... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 07, 2012 @01:28PM (#40247565)

    How many ipv4 nat routers are out there? How many of the big ISP's turned it on (or will by 'end of the year')?

    Take my ISP for example (a pretty big one). They are just talking about turning it on this year 'by the end of the year' (which is marketing speak for next year).

    Then how many consumer grade routers out there can you buy that are still only ipv4 (a lot btw). You have to go out of your way to get something with IPv6 you need to know exactly which router to get. You even had one decent sized manufacture yank the feature out for all intents and purposes so be careful which firmware you are running... Sure you can flash the firmware on many to get it. But what a pain. I dont feel like playing root my wireless access point to get a feature which should ALREADY be included... In 2005 this was understandable. In 2012 not so much anymore...

    Then we can talk about the devices themselves. There are thousands of embedded devices out there sold within the past 2 years that ONLY do IPv4. TV's being the worst of the offenders... Bought a network enabled bluray a couple of months ago. IPv4 only... And both of these devices are from major manufactures...

    the tl;dr ver 'it will take time not enough devices that support it yet'.

    • by Mashiki ( 184564 )

      Take my ISP for example (a pretty big one). They are just talking about turning it on this year 'by the end of the year' (which is marketing speak for next year).

      Is it rogers? They've been saying that up here in Canada for the last few years, heck my ISP(teksavvy) who leases from their headend still doesn't have IPv6 for cable. Though they've been working to get IPv6 for DSL up and running for the last couple of years and you can opt in via their beta program, and they even provide a compatible firmware for most open-standard routers.

  • Calling IPv6 broccoli is a horrible analogy. IPv6 is chocolate, vanilla, cake, topped in cheese sauce. The only reason it is not being widely used is that IPv4 is working for the vast majority of people and they are not willing to invest time or money on equipment in switching to IPv6. Hopefully, this will change.

    The day my ISP and my home hardware (MacOSX, Roku, iPhone, Android) support IPv6, I am using it.

    • by gstoddart ( 321705 ) on Thursday June 07, 2012 @01:34PM (#40247641) Homepage

      Calling IPv6 broccoli is a horrible analogy. IPv6 is chocolate, vanilla, cake, topped in cheese sauce.

      So, it sounds disgusting and nobody wants it? Cheese sauce on cake?

      That would explain a lot.

      • Cream cheese frosting is delicious and fairly common. If you've never had it you're missing out.

        • Cream cheese frosting is one thing.

          Cheese sauce in the context of broccoli (which is how we got here) is an entirely different thing ... that's either Cheese Whiz, or a bechamel sauce with cheese melted into it.

          On cake, cheese sauce sounds nasty.

      • I think he's implying that the cheese sauce is the effort needed to implement it. IPv6 sounds ever increasingly delicious, that is until you get to where you actually need to lift up a finger to add it to your network, in which case then that delectable chocolate vanilla cake has been soured by the cheddar of corporate laziness.

    • All your Apple gear has supported IPv6 out of the box for a few years now. I think Windows supports it out of the box, and probably your Android phone too, though I'm less sure about that. Most likely the missing link is your NAT box (unless you have an Apple box, which as I said is IPv6 ready), and your ISP.

  • I wonder how a quick fix approach would have been accepted. Something simple like slapping another 32bits on an "extended" IPv4 address and assuming leading zeros on any packet with an old 32 bit address.
    • I wonder how a quick fix approach would have been accepted. Something simple like slapping another 32bits on an "extended" IPv4 address and assuming leading zeros on any packet with an old 32 bit address.

      Except of course everyone would still need to upgrade to versions which would work with that.

      Which would be just as big as getting to them to upgrade to IPv6. Probably even bigger since nobody has ever written code to handle your solution.

      I don't think there's anything "quick" about your solution.

      • Yes, clearly either would need an upgrade, but IPv6 is a lot more than just an address extension so the work involved is much greater. Was the extra engineering and features worth the extra delay in adoption?
    • Re:Quick Fix (Score:4, Insightful)

      by doshell ( 757915 ) on Thursday June 07, 2012 @02:05PM (#40248021)

      Routers and end systems would still need to be taught how to speak a new protocol; machines that only know how to construct and decode packets in IPv4 format would be unable to deal with your "extended addresses". What exactly would you gain?

      Also, IPv6 is much more than just an extension of the addressing space. I won't bother listing all the niceties here since it has been done before (and you can find them easily). But to think that everything IPv6 has to offer is a lot more addresses is extremely narrow-minded.

      • still need to be taught how to speak a new protocol

        Yes, I said so above though not in the original post. Nobody said anything about not needing an upgrade. You are arguing against a phantom.

        IPv6 is much more than just an extension of the addressing space.

        Yes, I said so above, again not explicitly in the original post because that was the point: the extra features slowed adoption.

    • by Lennie ( 16154 )

      1. As mentioned by others, people would still need to upgrade their hardware/software to work with it.

      2. we already had fixed to extend the life of IPv4:
      - Classless Inter-Domain Routing (CIDR)
      - Use of private network addressing / NAT
      - Name-based virtual hosting of web sites
      - Tighter control by regional Internet registries on the allocation of addresses to local Internet registries

      3. the other thing people keep mentioning is reclaiming the large legacy IPv4-address blocks from for example Apple and HP.

      As the

  • I really tried. I tried versions of DD-WRT, OpenWRT, and Tomato on my WRT54GL. I tried using 6to4 using both anycast and tunnelbroker. The best I managed to achieve with either method was successfully pinging ipv6.google.com. I never succeeded in pulling it up in a browser on any of my computers. I thought I got radvd working, but it must not have been working well enough. Maybe next year.

    • by Lennie ( 16154 )

      Well, that is at least one thing that the World IPv6 day actually brought us.

      Facebook, Google/Youtube, Bing, Akamai, Netflix and others now all have IPv6 enabled and they are going to keep it that way.

      So pinging ipv6.google.com isn't needed anymore, you can just ping www.google.com ;-)

      And there is nothing to change in the browser, the websites all look the same anyway.

  • I Tried Anyway... (Score:3, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 07, 2012 @01:47PM (#40247777)

    I bought a business connection from my local provider, asked my salesperson if they had IPv6, they said yes. Tried to set it up for World IPv6 day. Well, their tech support says no they do not have IPv6. So, that was my IPv6 day experience.

    • by TeddyR ( 4176 )

      Front line tech support and supervisors have NO idea what ipv6 is or how to get it to you.

      I have Charter cable, and "just for fun", called tech to ask about if they had native ipv6 availible, and if not, if they had better "regional" tunnels or 6rd gateways. Note that I already had the info from http://www.myaccount.charter.com/customers/Support.aspx?SupportArticleID=2665 [charter.com] working with my Linksys E4200v2; I just wanted to see if there was a closer 6rd tunnel gateway to my location. Over 45 mins and no help

      • Re:I Tried Anyway... (Score:4, Interesting)

        by mikael_j ( 106439 ) on Thursday June 07, 2012 @02:44PM (#40248467)

        When I last worked in the ISP business, or more specifically for an open citynet which handled last-mile access for a number of ISPs, we would get the occasional request about IPv6, both from regular customers who couldn't get a clear answer from their ISP and from the ISPs using "our" network. From the number of requests and the tone of the requests from the ISPs there was clearly customer demand for IPv6.

        After a very long time of us forwarding all of these requests to upper management the reply finally came through. The official stance of the citynet was that there had been no noticeable demand for IPv6 and thus there were currently no plans to make the network IPv6-capable. This was told to all tech support and customer service staff as well, any requests from ISPs (or customers calling us directly) was to be answered with some version of "well as far as I know you're the first to ask and we currently don't have any plans to make our network IPv6-capable in the foreseeable future.".

        Yup, upper management thought the investment would be too big so they "decided" that there was no demand and ordered everyone else to play along with their little fantasy.

        • by Lennie ( 16154 )

          The network hardware vendors tried this and their strategy failed, it might have delayed it, guess what will happen to an ISP or other network provider that doesn't do IPv6 ?

  • by synapse7 ( 1075571 ) on Thursday June 07, 2012 @01:55PM (#40247859)
    I though tit was sad that bing.com and yahoo.com did not return a v6 address yesterday.
    • They might be waiting for the tech savvy slashdot folks to lead the way...

      ; > DiG 9.8.1-P1 > aaaa slashdot.org ;; global options: +cmd ;; Got answer: ;; ->>HEADER- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 26261 ;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 0, AUTHORITY: 1, ADDITIONAL: 0

      • They might be waiting for the tech savvy slashdot folks to lead the way...

        $ host -t aaaa lwn.net
        lwn.net has no AAAA record
        $ host -t aaaa arstechnica.com
        arstechnica.com has no AAAA record
        $ host -t aaaa tomshardware.com
        tomshardware.com has no AAAA record
        $ host -t aaaa phoronix.com
        phoronix.com has no AAAA record
        $ host -t aaaa smallnetbuilder.com
        smallnetbuilder.com has no AAAA record

    • But to be honest, I am not sure if that held the adoption rate down...

    • by Lennie ( 16154 )

      bing.com and yahoo.com don't return a v6-address, but they both are only a redirect.

      www.bing.com and www.yahoo.com do return a v6-address.

  • China??? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by GPLHost-Thomas ( 1330431 ) on Thursday June 07, 2012 @01:59PM (#40247937)
    I'd like to know who's the users in China with IPv6. There's no provider, ADSL or otherwise, that provides IPv6. The only place where you could find IPv6 would be universities. And what's funny with it, is that it shows that the Great Firewall of China doesn't cope with v6 at all. All sites that would normally be blocked are wide open. So until the GFW is "patched", I don't think IPv6 will come. That's quite a shame, because I've read multiple times that the big ISPs backbones are already IPv6 capable.
    • Would it be possible to use a tunnel broker to hit ipv6 sites?
    • by Lennie ( 16154 )

      I actually heared, China has some of the biggest installations of Carrier Grade NAT.

      Maybe because Windows XP is still used which doesn't have IPv6-enabled by default (and no GUI to do it) they thought it would be difficult to support IPv6 for those users ?

  • Hey, cool, facebook now resolves to an IPv6 address by default :)

    As for my point, how will regular consumers deal with firewalling? Modern OSes have to have good firewall protection, because people take laptops to all kinds of insecure networks. Stil, I'm not sure it's a good idea to make all devices directly accessible over the internet, it's kind of like begging for a wormpocalypse. On the other hand, we have UPnP for NAT-ed IPv4, allowing applications to specifically request incoming ports. This is cruc

    • by fa2k ( 881632 )
      Btw, one neat solution for TCP if we use stateless firewalls would be to have a third party mediate the initial connection setup, and bypass the SYN/SYN ACK bit. Two IPv6 peers would be able to send normal ACK packets back and forth, if the OS allowed one to create such connections without setup. Maybe UDP could be left wide open, or one could use a stateful firewall for that
    • by heypete ( 60671 )

      NAT isn't security. There's no real difference between IPv4+NAT+stateful firewall and IPv6+stateful firewall in terms of security, with the exception that with IPv6 you don't need port forwarding and other weird hacks like you do with IPv4 NAT.

      I haven't looked into it, but I woudn't be surprised if UPnP had been extended to IPv6 stateful firewalls: rather than forwarding ports to an internal IPv4 address, the firewall could simply open the incoming port to that IPv6 address. Same effect, but with less kludg

    • Stil, I'm not sure it's a good idea to make all devices directly accessible over the internet, it's kind of like begging for a wormpocalypse.

      You're expected to have a stateful firewall at the very same place where you have a NAT right now. This is described in RFC 4864 [rfc-editor.org].

    • by jandrese ( 485 )
      You know what's sad? Some Facebook games are broken on IPv6. My wife was complaining to me yesterday about how I broke the network, even though I've had a v6 tunnel set up for a couple of years now.
  • What about /.? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 07, 2012 @02:59PM (#40248661)

    Why isn't slashdot accessible over IPv6?

  • On the Google IPv6 statistics, it says in Romania IPv6 is faster than IPv4.

  • by tdelaney ( 458893 ) on Thursday June 07, 2012 @07:18PM (#40251605)

    My ISP (Internode [on.net]) has been providing opt-in dual-stack support for at least a couple of years, and enabled it by default for all new customers in January. Internode currently have about 2% of their customer base on IPv6.

    Note: if you go to that page and the logo is spinning, it means you've connected via IPv6.

    I get a static /56 prefix (earlier when it was still considered a trial they gave a /64 that could change when you lost ADSL connection). My router (Billion 7800N) acts as a DHCPv6 server and everything is hunkey-dory except for one minor quibble - the router advertises the upstream DNSv6 servers instead of itself, so if you've done static MAC->IPv4 mapping in the router they won't be returned when a DNSv6 request is made. The fix there is to manually set the link-local address of the router as the DNSv6 server on each of the machines.

Keep up the good work! But please don't ask me to help.

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