Follow Slashdot stories on Twitter

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×
The Internet Businesses Networking Upgrades IT

Why the Journey To IPv6 Is Still the Road Less Traveled 390

alphadogg writes The writing's on the wall about the short supply of IPv4 addresses, and IPv6 has been around since 1999. Then why does the new protocol still make up just a fraction of the Internet? Though IPv6 is finished technology that works, rolling it out may be either a simple process or a complicated and risky one, depending on what role you play on the Internet. And the rewards for doing so aren't always obvious. For one thing, making your site or service available via IPv6 only helps the relatively small number of users who are already set up with the protocol, creating a nagging chicken-and-egg problem.
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Why the Journey To IPv6 Is Still the Road Less Traveled

Comments Filter:
  • by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 20, 2015 @05:29PM (#49515189)

    My border router is more than IPv6 ready. It's already passing out IPv6 addresses internally to the few devices which are capable of them. Not that it matters to me though, my ISP doesn't support IPv6 so what's the point? Yea, I can touch my router from my laptop over IPv6, but what does that get me?

    Who is my ISP? Why Verizon FIOS of course. Until they decide to support IPv6 and give out addresses to people like me who are ready to use it, there won't be any mass adoption of IPv6 by their customers.

    Are their any ISP's out there which support residential IPv6?

  • by slowdeath ( 2836529 ) on Monday April 20, 2015 @05:37PM (#49515241)

    Have Facebook and/or Google go IPV6 only for website access. You will see virtually 100% adoption of IPV6 within 24hrs ...

  • by rmdingler ( 1955220 ) on Monday April 20, 2015 @05:46PM (#49515311) Journal
    IPv6 isn't backwards compatible to IPv4 and most people don't need it yet.

    Oh, and there's a learning curve. Most people are like water... path of least resistance.

    • The main difference tech people will see is that they can't ping an IPv6 address from memory. mDNS (as in xyz.local) will become the only way to access another machine with any sanity.

      Monitoring DNS at home, most services are already mixing (with a preference, but quick fallback from IPv6). So I'd say that the major websites are already primarily accessed via IPv6. You won't notice it.

      It'll just take years...

    • by sjames ( 1099 )

      For the average home user, there is no learning curve. One day their ISP will flip the switch and they'll just go on using the internet as before, unaware that anything changed.

  • by mtippett ( 110279 ) on Monday April 20, 2015 @05:57PM (#49515383) Homepage

    I have IPV6 at home (took some calls to AT&T Customer Support). I don't have it at work, the migration will probably start small network endpoints (phones (apparently t-mobile has already switch), and home networks).

    Link local IPV6 is already fairly broadly available - it's the fe80 prefixed address on your ifconfig output. You should be able to ping other ipv6 addresses on your network (*nix to *nix).

    Google's IPv6 stats page indicates this too... https://www.google.com/intl/en... [google.com] has a peculiar comb effect for the last few years. Zooming in seems to give a bit more insight. Google's count of IPv6 connections has a full 1% swing over the weekends vs the week days. Due to IPv6's addressing method, each unique device on your network appears as a unique device on the internet, vs the NATed IPv4 that we all know and love. This would also have an accelerating increase in the number of unique IPs that are visible on the weekend. I know I use more devices over the weekend (chromebook, phone, laptop, table) vs during the week.

    Open to other insights, but our homes will be likely IPv6 before our offices are. (Of course aggressive tech companies like google and facebook are likely already IPv6).

    • Came here to say this. Also note how far the US is ahead of the rest of the world. It's a rare scenario where the US is a world leader in something Internet. 14.5% of all Google's US connections are v6, and it's higher on the weekends. Only Belgium does better. The major US ISPs have actually been pretty good about v6 and at least TWC/Comcast offer it to all their customers, and all their provided routers do it automatically. All the other major ISPs I know about are at least testing deployment. As people s

  • by NotInHere ( 3654617 ) on Monday April 20, 2015 @06:06PM (#49515453)

    I think that in countries with many ipv4 addresses per internet user, we won't see any change soon, they still can support one ip per home. The US is one of those. It has tons of IPs. In countries without much ipv4 addresses, the companies (especially new ones, which don't sit on millions of addresses) will see the pressure, and will run a carrier grade NAT & native ipv6 approach.

  • by alexhs ( 877055 ) on Monday April 20, 2015 @06:06PM (#49515459) Homepage Journal

    I can do IPv6 from my ISP since last November. My issues so far have been:

    • The ISP ADSL router hasn't been extensively tested for IPv6. Its caching DNS server tends to die after approximately 10 days, and the IPv6 connection itself is at times unavailable (probably not an up-link issue as rebooting the ADSL router fixes the issue. Temporarily.)
    • Some web sites have registered a DNS entry for IPv6, but don't have a properly configured IPv6 HTTP server. I could ask the DNS resolver to try IPv4 first, but then when would I actually be using IPv6 ?
    • I can't even experience the non-NAT'ed network, as I don't have IPv6 access from the work place.

    On the other hand, IPv6 was doing fine 12 years ago, on the IPv6 backbone from the university.

    • by wbean ( 222522 )
      I disabled ipv6 last night. Comcast drops the connection after a day or two and then anything that is trying to use ipv6 takes forever to fail over to ipv4. It was interfering with my usage. The only way to solve it was to reboot the router. Not worth it.
  • by mtippett ( 110279 ) on Monday April 20, 2015 @06:10PM (#49515483) Homepage

    With the current incantation of Amazon Web Services (VPC),

    IPv6 support is currently not available for load balancers in Amazon VPC (EC2-VPC).

    http://docs.aws.amazon.com/Ela... [amazon.com]

    So there goes lots of the internet....

  • This has been written in a very pro-selldata approach:

    For example, if the proxy that’s providing a user’s address is located in a different city from that user, then location data that could aid in targeting ads would be unusable, he said.

    So, should ipv6 be enabled because it kills privacy? This article is stupid shit. I really don't like if internet protocols are designed with "targeting ads" in mind. This is where the google involvement into internet standardisation has brought us to: an internet built to spy on us. Google is not very much more than that: a company getting billions from running the most profitable internet ad network in the world (visit this [sec.gov], and search for "Advertising

  • hosts file (Score:4, Funny)

    by gmhowell ( 26755 ) <gmhowell@gmail.com> on Monday April 20, 2015 @06:38PM (#49515693) Homepage Journal

    I would switch, but then I'd have to rewrite my hosts files.

    • by Imagix ( 695350 )
      You use hosts files for something other than adblocking? :) 127.0.0.1 still works for that purpose. Or you could add ::1 entries as well.. should be a quick script to set that up.
    • APK's got you covered. :P

  • just wait for ISP's to bill you per IP / outlet and ban / lockout NAT.

    Right now ISP like Comcast may a lot of outlets fees on there TV side and when TV starts to really die down the last thing you want to have is to have it like the old phones days where they made for pay / rent EACH PHONE. Right now the cell phones provides make you pay per line to use the same shared pool of data / minutes and make you pay more to unlock tethering.

  • by egarland ( 120202 ) on Tuesday April 21, 2015 @12:21AM (#49517263)

    Automatic address assignment: Useless. DHCP is better.

    No more NAT: Useless. NAT is part of firewalls which are still needed. It's easy, and incredibly flexible.

    Better multicast routing: Useless. Multicast is dead, and will remain so.

    Simplified routing: Useless. This has been implemented outside IP

    QOS: Useless. The IPv6 implementation is wrong for how QOS is used now.

    Larger Address Space: The only useful feature in IPv6, but it was done wrong, and should be abandoned.

    We need IPv8 that does things right for the internet we have *today* not the internet we thought we'd need in 1998.

    • You've clearly never had to talk someone through configuring a port forward on their router so that a file transfer over IM could work, or so they could host a game server. NAT mostly works, but it turns a lot of things that should 'just work' into a need to fiddle around with the router config.

  • by WaffleMonster ( 969671 ) on Tuesday April 21, 2015 @01:14AM (#49517417)

    I quite like vastly increased difficulty of scanning the whole IPv6 Internet. As soon as Comcast fixes their business class remote access via IPv4 is going bye bye. Sick of looking at all this crap in my logs. If random fools want to spam me they are going to have to work for it.

Ocean: A body of water occupying about two-thirds of a world made for man -- who has no gills. -- Ambrose Bierce

Working...