The IPv4 Internet Hiccups 248
New submitter pla writes: Due to a new set of routes published yesterday, the internet has effectively undergone a schism. All routers with a TCAM allocation of 512k (or less), in particular Cisco Catalyst 6500 and 7600's, have started randomly forgetting portions of the internet. 'Cisco also warned its customers in May that this BGP problem was coming and that, in particular, a number of routers and networking products would be affected. There are workarounds, and, of course the equipment could have been replaced. But, in all too many cases this was not done. ... Unfortunately, we can expect more hiccups on the Internet as ISPs continue to deal with the BGP problem." Is it time to switch to all IPv6 yet?
hmmmmm (Score:2, Funny)
Surely 512k ought to be enough for any router?
Yes, Please (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Yes, Please (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Yes, Please (Score:5, Insightful)
Many new home routers are ready but a lot of people haven't bought a router in years
So? Most people hadn't bought a broadband router at all 15 years ago. Most people hadn't bought a wireless router 10 years ago. People don't buy until you give them an incentive. And until you man up and tell people "Look, you have a year to buy an IPv6 router or get one from your ISP, or we're cutting you off" no one has any incentive to get off their fat asses and do what needs to be done to move us ahead.
If we had continued to keep the automobile speed limit at 10 mph year-after-year because a few lazy old farts refused to give up their goddamned horses and buggies, we'd still be driving around today at 10 mph.
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Most people don't need to drive more than 10 mph in their driveway. And most people don't need router technology in their home that's newer than 10 years old.
It's the dilemma of the marketers. Cisco says 'buy new stuff.' News at seven.
Re:Yes, Please (Score:4)
And most people don't need router technology in their home that's newer than 10 years old.
Once their OS is told that www.google.com has internet address 2607:f8b0:4009:805::1010, they sure do.
Or once their ISP switches to IPv6.
What's sad is that slashdot.org does not have an AAAA address.
News for whom?
Stuff that what?
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This means that their DNS resolver will know to only return IPv4 routes since IPv6 routes aren't usable. Thus no problem.
That depends. The "filter AAAA on ipv4" option is quite new in bind 9, and probably not available on the majority of DNS installations out there.
My guess is that a majority of ISPs will gladly send IPv4 clients the AAAA records. Which, in my opinion, is a good thing. Just because the query goes through IPv4 doesn't necessarily mean a client doesn't have IPv6.
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If we had continued to keep the automobile speed limit at 10 mph year-after-year because a few lazy old farts refused to give up their goddamned horses and buggies, we'd still be driving around today at 10 mph.
19 mph, because no one pulls you over for doing 9 over, but 10? You're in the pen!
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And there would be much less carnage on the streets.
I hope that in 10-20 years when driverless cars have proliferated, that the safety of our streets will be back up to where it was a century ago.
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So the roads are twice as dangerous now as they were before the introduction of the motor vehicle. And no doubt it would be even worse if children didn't find ways to entertain themselves indoors because the streets are not as safe as they used to be.
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If we had continued to keep the automobile speed limit at 10 mph year-after-year because a few lazy old farts refused to give up their goddamned horses and buggies, we'd still be driving around today at 10 mph.
Bad car analogy time.
The problem wasn't the horse and buggy.
The problem was the expense of paving roads, replacing bridges and so on.
The problem was that the funding, construction and maintenance of roads and bridges was considered a local responsibility ---- down to the township level or below.
The "last mile" problem in its primal form.
It was never so politically simple as drawing a line between A and B and saying that this what we need to do.
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then maybe that's it - when the option comes to upgrade to a superfast fibre connection, you should be getting a IPv6 capable router at the same time. Generally the cheapass routers given away with home broadband can't even do fibre speeds, let alone have the fibre connections.
I'd have thought its an opportunity for ISPs to sell more stuff "upgrade to the new internet, faster and more reliable etc", but no - they still drag their heels and don't offer IPv6 at all. Mine is *still* doing a trial, going on for
Re:Yes, Please (Score:5, Insightful)
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if that happened, IPv6 would be made illegal in the US, with an exception for law enforcement and gov't officials.
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WiFi routers get replaced fairly regularly because the cheap ones most people buy have some crappy component in them that starts to degrade over time until their wifi becomes really crappy to use.
Unless you pay a lot for quality gear, or you get lucky, 5 years is a long time for a consumer/home user WAP to last. If you see a Dlink or Linksys WAP thats 5 years old and still works well, you're indeed lucky.
Not from what I've seen (Score:4, Insightful)
Not the fact that wifi routers degrade, you are totally right about that, but that people will replace them. I'm amazed at how shitty someone's Internet can be and they have an "Oh well, whatever," attitude about it.
A good example near and dear to me is my parents. They moved in to their current place about 7 years ago and got a cheapass Linksys router to handle their NAT and WiFi. It has been giving them enough grief for me to hear about it for at least 3 years. They are not poor, a new router is not a big deal, yet they didn't get one. So I got tired of it, and also had an easy solution: When they were visiting me this June I upgraded my WAP to a new 802.11ac one and gave them my old one, which was working great.
They still haven't installed it. It's not like they don't have time, mom is retired and dad is semi-retired, it's not like it is hard, it is much simpler to set up than their old model and they can always call me. They just haven't bothered. Their router acts up, they go reset it, and don't bother to replace it.
Another somewhat related example would be a friend of mine. He's a young guy, under 30, and quite technically savvy. He's complained to me that the Internet at his house is not meeting advertised speeds, going quite well below it. Strange, since we are both on the same ISP, and live only a couple miles from each other and my experience has been that they always are right around max. I inquire a bit more and find out he still has a DOCSIS 2 modem. Ahh ok, well that is probably the issue. Though his connection is of a speed that a single DOCSIS channel can handle (25mbps), that modem has one one channel to choose from and it could well be too loaded down by other people on the segment. So my recommendation was to get a DOCSIS 3 modem. An 8x4 modem that is compatible can be had for like $80. That should solve any speed issues since now there's a bunch of channels to choose from, and will be compatible when they bump the speeds in the future.
He didn't want to spend the money, and so just complains occasionally about the speed.
For whatever reason, there are more than a few people who will just use old, failing, technology and bitch about it rather than fix the issue.
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Of course Wifi router is the only thing at home that needs support for ipv6 right?
Hell, DS's don't even support WPA ffs.
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Home routers fail after a few years anyway so most home users are probably IPV6 ready.
Re: Yes, Please (Score:2)
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When they or their kids discover bittorrent or Facebook jumps the shark in the number of connections per page even more than it has they'll find that the net just will not behave as nicely for them anymore with their old router that wasn't designed to be hit that hard. When they get their new cheap and nasty bottom of the range Chinese device they'll find it can both vastly outperform their old thing and later it will handl
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My ISP supports IPv6, my router supposedly supports IPv6 (Asus RT-N66U), I can see the router getting an IPv6 address from my ISP, I can see my PC getting an IPv6 address from my router yet when I test it out on the various "do I have IPv6" pages it's failing.
After spending a couple of hours mucking around I gave up. I'll deal with it when it matters. Hopefully it's less painful then.
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That's been my exact experience. IPv6 is supposed to be dead simple (compared to IPv4) for home users. I am definitely not a home user and I still can't get it working with my ISP.
There are new routers that don't work (Score:5, Informative)
I actually bought a new router within the last year. A "nice" Buffalo model with DD-WRT built in. Only to find out DD-WRT doesn't support native IPv6 (which my old, faulty NetGear did, go figure). They just support Toredo or other tunneled IPv6 solutions.
Man, was I disappointed.
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And home users aren't even close to getting on board. Most people's PCs and other devices will handle IPV6 just fine.
No. While most new routers have some ipv6 capability, most new routers are not "ipv6 ready". It is lack of complete ipv6 support in routers that is preventing widespread adoption.
Lack of incentives...? (Score:2)
To some degree obviously, there is a lack of incentives for ISPs to change - if they still have enough addresses for themselves, then switching to IPv6 is only costs, not benefits.
Maybe some of the larger sites, like youtube, facebook, wikipedia should have a meeting to discuss the switch-over and then start shaping IPv4 traffic - just reduce capacity on IPv4 by 5% every month and see how long it will be, before ISPs will lose customers if they DON'T switch to IPv6...
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Lobbying the FCC on the other hand, that could actually affect change. It would be in the best interest of everyone (excluding short term investors in the various ISPs), with networking equipment manufacturers poised to win the biggest
You know I was just talking with the wife last night about how of all the government agencies the FCC has always listened to the people and done the right thing,
The only truth there is the really surprising one. A /.er with a wife.
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The only truth there is the really surprising one. A /.er with a wife.
Wives are like PCs. If you need one, you need several. And you can always hack someone else's to use.
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Imagine if your business suddenly lost internet connectivity because your IP blocks have been reclaimed. You're going to be down until you can find an alternative solution. Enjoy.
Are the sites you want to visit ready? (Score:2)
If they can't hear/speak IPv6, then the Internet is going to feel like a very big empty room. Everyone needs to change to the new protocol. Everywhere. And IPv4 still has to work. Everywhere.
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We changed all our systems over time to handle this great IPv6 change, and haven't used IPv6 yet
You might have, but many of those systems still set to default to 512K routes also don't have IPv6 in ASIC, only in software on the anemic CPU. This will improve, but today shows us that not everybody is running the latest gear.
(not that IPv6 fixes this problem, but to the larger question)
Not ready for v6 yet (Score:2)
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Some of us need a lot of self reflection :/
Re:Not ready for v6 yet (Score:4, Insightful)
If it weren't for the stupidity of OS and IP stack authors, we'd be able to use the 240.0.0.0 - 255.255.255.254 addresses.
However, most of them refuse to route to those addresses because they're "Reserved for Future use."
Apparently no one stopped to think that blocking routing to those addresses would stop them from being used in the future because people insist on using older technology.
Not really to do with "BGP" or "IPv4" as such... (Score:4, Interesting)
This isn't really to do with BGP or IPv4 as such, it's an inherent problem in the way "The Internet" regards addresses.
You might be able to get some efficiencies in IPv6 by incorporating formerly-unrelated address allocations under a single prefix. But that doesn't solve the problem of a continuously growing network, increasingly complex (and commercially controversial) peering arrangements, the fact that IPv6 addresses are actually larger and the fact that you're going to have to support IPv4 anyway in parallel with any IPv6 transition (I don't personally believe it will ever happen, but that's a different story).
You could, however, get rather more efficiency in core routing tables if network addresses only had a very transient existence and were related to the source/destination route to be employed (eg: look up a domain name, do some route pre-computation, allocate some addressing tokens that make sense to the routers on the path, recalculate the route periodically or in response to packet loss). That's not IPv6, though. IPv6 has the same order of dependence on every router knowing about every destination network as IPv4 does (give or take the slightly greater prefixing efficiency).
TL;DR - The Internet is getting bigger. Buy more kit.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
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Comcast needed IPv6 internally, so they have rolled it out, even if you can't get it. Others have replied saying they've got IPv6 from them, as well.
Verizon offers LTE service, which is ALL IPv6. They've got 6to4, of course, but you can natively access any IPv6 services via your LTE phone.
And how does IPv6 solve this issue? (Score:2)
This is a real question: Do you know what IPv6 does instead of BGP? Because as far as I know, IPv6 is still using BGP, and that is what this is a problem with. In fact I can only see IPv6 making things worse in that regard because tons more address space means that more AS assignments would be easy to do.
So if it really does offer a solution, please enlighten me I'd be very interested. If this is just an example of trying to use a problem to push a favoured agenda, then please knock it off.
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Take a look at BellSouth's [he.net] list of announced prefixes for a pretty egregious example of this - Notice anything "funny" about it? They could reduce that list of almost 3000 down to under a hundred.
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Address space is large enough unless we do something seriously fucked up. The IPv6 adress space has enough Ip-adresses that every atom of the surface of the earth can have 40.000 adresses.
Or, to divide it up a bit:
A "local network" will probably get a /64. This is *enough*, trust me, it's so much addresses that it can comtain the entire ipv4 address space - SQUARED. Noone will ever need more adresses than that in a local network.
A typical "end site" (a company, or even maybe a home user) would probably get
IPv6 won't fix this problem (Score:3)
This particular problem is due to the way routing on the Internet works, where generally every router must hold routes for every prefix announced on the Internet. That system doesn't change with IPv6. Now, there might be fewer IPv6 prefixes at this time than IPv4, but intrinsically there's nothing about IPv6 that addresses the problem that all prefixes must have global visibility.
To fix this kind of problem requires changing how routing is done.
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Now, there might be fewer IPv6 prefixes at this time than IPv4, but intrinsically there's nothing about IPv6 that addresses the problem that all prefixes must have global visibility. ... To fix this kind of problem requires changing how routing is done.
IPv6 is intended to change how routing is done. The larger addresses make it easier to allocate prefixes hierarchically, as opposed to the smaller blocks which must be joined together for IPv4. For example, top-level prefixes could be naively assigned by combining 8 bits of latitude with 10 bits of longitude to create 256k /18s each covering approximately 800 square miles. Each /18 would have room to allocate each of up to ~1 billion customers a /48 prefix composed of 64k /64 subnets, each having 2**64 uniq
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See my reply to your sibling comment. Yes, people looked at geographical assignment and routing. No, this wasn't ever rolled out for IPv6.
Geographical routing could have worked well in some contexts, e.g. in regulated Internet connectivity markets, where some monopoly carrier controls end-access and is required to provide whole-sale access to other, virtual ISPs. This is the case in at least several European markets, where the monopoly carrier is the former state telco (Ireland, UK). With geographical rout
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People looked into geographical routing for IPv6. It never went anywhere though. Today, IPv6 address assignment and routing works pretty much like IPv4.
SDN (Score:2)
With SDN, an infinite number of prefixes can be stored on the SDN controller, and the Internet router only needs to load prefixes into the router TCAM when there is actually a flow needed for that prefix.
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There was and likely is some hardware that does it.
It's also easily DoSed.
We found this out in the 90s and early 2000's where people would .. well, try doing internet routing with Sup-1's.
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Sounds CPU intensive and slow.
No, it's CPU-intensive and fast. If you control the whole network (see Google, et. al.). CPU is not the bottleneck in 2014.
But the very last thing we want is central control of the Internet. We may wish to have SDN's outside each peering point, but that's the ISP's business, not the Internet's architecture's.
See, we can want one thing in one place and something else entirely in a different place. One-size-fits-all solutions don't attempt to address the requirements of each
We're the part that got dropped (Score:2)
Is IPv6 "perfect" or will there be an IPv8? (Score:3)
Given the time between IPv6 design and the eventual global adoption of it and abandonment of IPv4, will the broader adoption of IPv6 reveal problems addressed in a future revision?
I'll admit to being willfully ignorant of IPv6 other than seeing it as enormously more complicated than IPv4, trying to solve too many problems at once. I sometimes wonder if maybe IPv6 didn't appear so complicated and different that adoption might have been increased.
Couldn't they just have added a couple of extra bytes to IPv4 to come up with something that worked like IPv4? I also wonder about an addressing scheme like IPX, where a single network address covers an entire broadcast domain and node addresses are MAC addresses plus the network address. IPX network addresses were only 8 bytes, maybe that wouldn't be future proof enough (4.2 billion networks). I'm not talking about IPX as a protocol, just the system for addressing.
The advantage is relative simplicity (no need for DHCP, network addresses are discovered and the rest is built-in), broadcast domains can scale arbitrarily large without needing to renumber -- sure you can start out every network with a /16, but often they don't and there are complications in organizations just arbitrarily shifting masks past /24, such as running into other networks in the local routing domain.
Since node addresses are locally determined, ISPs would need to only assign a network address which would allow for basically unlimited public network addresses to each subscriber.
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I'll admit to being willfully ignorant of IPv6 other than seeing it as enormously more complicated than IPv4
I think seeing it as way more complicated is a mistake. They took IPv4, fixed a few problems, and unfortunately introduced a few others. Sure, they could have done a little less.
Couldn't they just have added a couple of extra bytes to IPv4 to come up with something that worked like IPv4?
That fairly much describes IPv4; the other proposals floating around were far more radical.
node addresses are MAC addresses plus the network address
This is covered by RFC 2462 - IPv6 Stateless Address Autoconfiguration. However, privacy concerns have made this go out of fashion.
IPv6 is much simpler than IPv4 (Score:2)
Really, even if you are completely ignorant about it, it does not take much more than a short reading to see how simpler IPv6 is. That's why it corrects so many issues.
The problem with IPX style local names assignment is in security. Doing it in the open, wild Internet is a certain way to destroy it. The nearest option that's actualy usable is dynamic DNS, and it's quite widspread.
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Incentives for aggregation??? (Score:2)
Are there incentives of any kind for operators to think twice before making piecemeal routing advertisements? Is there any cost for multi-homing every rinky-dink company who thinks they are important enough to warrant such misuse?
Now that IPv4 resources are gone do operators pay out any penalty when they go off and start announcing random piecemeal /24's right and left?
I don't care if the penalty is simply a listing on a global wall of shame.
While IPv6 stands to reduce absolute need for disaggregation it w
who the hell uses a 6500 as their ISP router? (Score:2)
I've been a Cisco networking guy for 10+ years - the 6500 series is a Distribution/Core technology for the LAN - it's definitely been milked over the years but the 4500 series is basically designed to phase it out
some of the 7600 routers (the older bricks) - I can also understand - but seriously - if you are a core internet provider, why the hell are you using a 6500 router for the BGP routing table of the internet? Put that thing in a dorm room and buy yourself an ASR 9000
RB
Re:Is it time to switch to all IPv6 yet? (Score:4, Informative)
How much more gradual do you want? I've been running dual stack for over a decade with a tunnel back to HE. At this stage most of your equipment runs fine with IPv6.
Re:Is it time to switch to all IPv6 yet? (Score:4, Funny)
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Well, if you pay for the cost, otherwise it will be much easier to just patch the problems and keep on going.
Yeah, in the same sense that it's easier for a Calcutta slum to keep running recycled appliance cording as power lines rather than adopt modern electrical standards. At a certain point, putting another shitty patch on an ad-hoc fucking mess has to give way to some kind of organized system, even if it means some short-term pain. We can't have piss and shit running down the street because some of the neighbors don't want to put up with the hassle and cost of building a modern sewer system.
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Everything is a patch. Everything is an update. There's no such thing as 'rip everything out and reinstall.'
Well, there is, but it failed the several times it was tried in the 20th century.
Get used to the maintenance cycles. It's really all we've got.
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Re:Betteridge (Score:4, Insightful)
You're right. It was time 10 years ago. Now it's way PAST time.
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Except that this has nothing to do with IPv6. IPv6 will do nothing to resolve this problem and will in fact make it worse because the problem itself is due to a router not having enough RAM and nothing about IPv6 results in less RAM usage.
Sure, we should get on the IPv6 bandwagon, well, except it sucks right now and can lead to some annoying connectivity issues when sites are misconfigured, or setup IPv6 and then forget about it so you're trying to connect to an IPv6 address thats no longer used because no
Re:Betteridge (Score:5, Informative)
One of the design goals of IPv6 was to reduce the size of the global routing table. That's why there are so many more addresses in IPv6 than there are ever going to be devices. Each provider gets so much address space that nobody needs to come back for more. That means there's no address space fragmentation due to address scarcity, like there is with IPv4, where providers usually have dozens or hundreds of separate allocations which can't be aggregated and must all be entered into the global routing table. IPv6 addresses are four times as long as IPv4 addresses, but there are far more than four times as many routing table entries per ASN with IPv4 than with IPv6
Re:Betteridge (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Betteridge (Score:5, Informative)
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This is not technically the explanation for the 2x ratio difference, at least on the Cisco platform under the microscope here. It is slightly more nuanced than that.
The TCAM entries are divided up into two bucket sizes: 72 bit buckets and 144 bit buckets.
An IPv4 address is 32 bits
An IPv6 address is 128 bits
An IPv4 FIB entry is 32-bits plus any additional bits it stores like interface and next-hop info
An IPv6 FIB entry is 128-bits plus any additional bits it stores like interface and next-hop info
128 bits do
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That doesn't solve the problem, it mitigates ONE aspect of the problem.
It will effect large ISPs with large numbers of IPs, which are few and far between.
It does nothing to resolve the actual problem of router table growth which is caused by the number of networks, multihoming and address portability.
Multihoming and address portability make what you've said irrelevant, and thats where the growth comes from.
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Except people can, have and will deaggregate IPv6 space to do Traffic Engineering.
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My ISP does IPv6, as does all my equipment. I had to disable it so that the rest of my family doesn't wonder why random sites don't work on their PC but work fine on their phone and while I can't remember the ones off to the top of my head, there are some big ones that regularly fuck up.
Wow, your setup sucks. My ISP offers native IPv6 and all our laptops, tablets, etc. come up with both protocols live. I have literally never, not once, zero times, ever had a problem that traced back to having IPv6 enabled. Maybe we just buy better equipment or have a better ISP or something, because it Just Works for everyone in our household.
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OK, but apart from the sanitation, medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh water system and public health, what has IPV4 ever done for us?
Re:Betteridge (Score:5, Funny)
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"Is it time to switch to all IPv6 yet?"
No.
Sure. When most people will have adopted IPv6, we'll have a lot more IPv4 available!
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You have no idea what you are talking about. Two words: prefix aggregation.
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Why would that be different than with IPv4? Prefix aggregation, AKA route summary, AKA Supernetting, has been available for a very long time. Unless IPv6 addresses are being handed out in a way that's much more conducive to this, it won't really change anything. This guy agrees (#4) [cisco.com]
Further, since IPv6 is a longer address, fewer can be stored. Per Cisco [cisco.com], the Catalyst 6500 can handle 1M IPv4 addresses, OR 512K IPv6 addresses (but not both simultaneously)
(Yes, I know the Catalyst is a switch, not a router,
Re:IPv6 (Score:5, Informative)
Unless IPv6 addresses are being handed out in a way that's much more conducive to this, it won't really change anything
Which they are, as a direct result of v6 being so huge. See RFCs 1715 and 3194 for discussion on this.
Obviously in the long run we'll end up with a higher absolute count of routes in v6 (because supporting more people was the other reason for it) but the route count will scale far better than a network that has to be run at a ridiculously high HD-ratio because it's too small.
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Why would that be different than with IPv4? Prefix aggregation, AKA route summary, AKA Supernetting, has been available for a very long time. Unless IPv6 addresses are being handed out in a way that's much more conducive to this, it won't really change anything. This guy agrees (#4) [cisco.com]
He is kinda correct, but the RIR's have come up with addressing plans to deal with this.
/29 minimum. This is 2^35 networks (assuming you are using a /64 per network as recommended). If you prove you need more than a /29, fine, you can have it.
/29? Fine, increase your subnet mask to /28 and carry on. This doubles you address space. Carry on unti
My info comes from the RIPE region, as its the region I'm in.
Every ISP gets assigned a
The next 3 bits are then reserved for future use. You use up your initial
Re: IPv6 (Score:2)
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Isnt subnetting more a software implementation DHCP, and BGP thing in the router, enter a net mask address and network address into the router config and then the router can analyse the addresses to determine if they are local or not. It seems, if IPV6 does not provide an equivalent for DHCP's getting the net mask then we are screwed. But net masks are not something you find in the IP packets headers themselves.
Re:IPv6 would make the problem worse (Score:4, Insightful)
v6 makes things better, because it uses 128-bit addresses rather than 32-bit addresses. See RFCs 1715 and 3194 for the details.
Yes, there's a small linear factor of extra memory required for v6 routes vs v4 routes, but that's irrelevant compared to the route count reduction that comes from a lower HD ratio.
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There's no good reason to think there'll be a significant improvement in HD with IPv6, or significantly fewer prefixes advertised.
The issue is orthogonal to IPv6, it's fundamentally about how Internet routing is organised today. No hierarchy, and all prefixes must have global visibility. Hierarchical routing of the 90s has a bit of a bad name, and support for aggregation in BGP has been deprecated. However, there are things like topographical-landmark routing, which improve on the deficiencies of hierarchic
Re:IPv6 would make the problem worse (Score:4, Insightful)
but that's irrelevant compared to the route count reduction that comes from a lower HD ratio.
Only if you assume you can reduce routes because there are so many people with diverse blocks in their network, which isn't the case so much.
The route count is much more a result of multihoming and portable address space, which means larger prefixes aren't going to help at all. At no point in my career would my provider having a larger prefix helped reduce the routing table as I have always had either portable address space, which is a direct allocation from a NIC rather than an ISP, or been multi homed which means at best I get the addresses from ONE of the peers and announce it out to another peer, but in that case traffic gets all screwed up if the upstream provider which allocated me the non-portable space aggregates it since aggregated addresses aren't preferred over non-aggregated address space.
I.E. larger upstream prefixes don't really help at all.
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First of all, paragraphs are your friend.
Second of all, the solution you described already exists.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
On that same page, there are a bunch of other solutions as well, this has already been thought of :)
No transition period? (Score:2)
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Hmm, the example on that page is interesting (Score:2)
So the "compressed IPv6 address" has the low order bits used to reflect an IPv4 address. But I thought the low order bits were going to be MAC address bits in IPv6? The two seem inconsistent.
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The fact is, TCP v6 was defective by design, because of what it does not have, and that is a mechanism for a long transition period between ipv4 and ipv6. If we had such transition period, ipv6 would now be widespread. The transition period means that ipv4 and ipv6 networks can communicate with each other.
It's 2014 ... can we all just take a breath and realize there is simply NO solution to the pigeonhole problem that does not resemble CGN?
The only operationally viable solution for IPv6 deployment in a production environment (e.g. solution with minimal breakage) is dual stack with IPv4 CGN as needed.
The more complex but entirely doable part is ipv4->ipv6. Since ipv6 is larger address space than ipv4, ipv4 cannot directly see a lot of ipv6 addresses. The answer lies in the DNS system. When a user on an ipv4 network askes for the IP address associated with a DNS address which only has an ipv6 address associated with it, somewhere upstream, an upstream router and DNS server will conspire to 1) give the user (ipv4 peer) a fake IPv4 address for a DNS address 2) give the information on the ipv6 to fake ipv4 mapping to the router 3) which the router uses NAT to rewrite the packets headed out from from the fake ipv4 destination address to the real ipv6 destination address.
While your deploying NAT-PT and fielding calls from angry customers burned by IP literals embedded in web sites and protocols your competitors are just deploying IPv6 dual stack and calling it a day.
You could even write an HTTP and other application protocol proxy that would automatically rewrite all ipv6 addresses in HTML with ipv6 TLD addresses.
As https depl
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Theoritically, any block of Ipv4 addresses outside of the local subnet could be used, if an ipv4 address is used as a fake address, and then the user asks DNS address which happens to resolve to a real IPv4 address with the same number, then, the same NAT trick could be used with a mapping between created between another temporary local ipv4 address to the real internet ipv4 address which was already being used locally as a fake ipv4 number. Though, I would only recommend that be used as a fallback if 127.x
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My solution is the one that would actually allow ISPs to gradually upgrade things over time rther than to replace everything at once, by allowing the interoperation. Its a lot easier if the changes are concentrated at the ISP end rather than effect subscribers as well. Its true that over time as due to the turnover of ipv4 older routers, that ISPs could gradually replace the subcribers routers with newer models. It would also be possible even for ISPs to collect older routers, flash them with new firmware,
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Re:Stop doing CIDR! (Score:4, Interesting)
OK, I've done BGP before, and I've never heard of anything smaller than a /24 being globally advertised -- most common router configurations won't even accept anything smaller.
That said, how is any network of any size supposed to protect itself again ISP outages other than multihoming? It clutters the routing table, but there is no other solution.
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This is exactly the kind of problem that makes you glad you overpaid for name brand hardware.
Which of these two answers to the question "Why did our network fall over and sink into the swamp yesterday?" would you like to give?
"Um, it's because I recommended saving a bit of money on buying off-brand routers that couldn't handle everything. I'll go clean out my desk."
or...
"It's not my fault! We bought [insert name brand here] because they were supposed to be better. Round up the rest of the managemen