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The Internet Technology

The State of IPv6 342

Posted by timothy from the send-more-atoms dept.
Gnea writes submits this article "about the current state of IPv6, the Next Generation of Internet Protocol version 6, mostly according to Cisco. It's also an interesting roadmap about where and how IPv6 will proliferate around the world.. Apparently China has a grasp already with Korea and Japan, who leads the "Five key Chinese carriers, including China Telecom, China Unicom, China Netcom/CSTNET, China Mobile, China RailCom and CERNET (China Education and Research Network), are slated to join CNGI, building their own national IPv6 backbone independently, while interconnecting with at least two IPv6 IX." while Verio appears to have already tuned into some turnkey solutions recently that are publicly available." And SgtChaireBourne writes "ZDNet is reporting that the EU and South Korea will collaborate to develop IPv6 applications and services. The agreement was finalized at the Global IPv6 Service Launch Event in Belgium last week. There are good reasons to move to IPv6, including security, multicasting, simplified header structures, and better routing to name a few."
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The State of IPv6 More

The State of IPv6

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  • This is one area the US could get left behind... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by bc90021 ( 43730 ) * <bc90021 AT bc90021 DOT net> on Wednesday January 21, 2004 @11:33AM (#8043224) Homepage
    ...if we don't quickly develop a plan to start working with IPv6. Most Pacific rim countries have already started, and for them, it is a matter of necessity. Since the US was responsible for a lot of the early internet (DARPA), we have the vast majority of the IPv4 addresses. Other countries (such as China) see IPv6 as a way to "equal the playing field" in addition to solving their "how do I get enough IPs for 1.2 billion people" problem.

    • Re:This is one area the US could get left behind.. (Score:5, Interesting)

      by grub ( 11606 ) <slashdot@grub.net> on Wednesday January 21, 2004 @11:39AM (#8043270) Homepage Journal

      Notice how North American-based networking gear manufacturers (Cisco, Nortel, et al) are all offering IPv6-ready devices? Ironically, it will be North Americans that will be late to the party.

      The telecoms sat on their thumbs during the dot-com-boom on IPv6, they won't be too eager to spend the money now that cash is tight.

      • Re:This is one area the US could get left behind.. (Score:2, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward
        Notice how North American-based networking gear manufacturers (Cisco, Nortel, et al) are all offering IPv6-ready devices? Ironically, it will be North Americans that will be late to the party.

        IPv6 is a solution looking for a problem. The IP address exhaustion scare of 4 or 5 years ago is a moot point these days after the dot com bombs, the explosion of usage of NAT, etc. People are beginning to realize there's NO point in having every device use an Internet accessible IP address. Our entire campus of 5

    • Re:This is one area the US could get left behind.. (Score:3, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Vast majorities don't get left behind.

  • Here's... (Score:4, Informative)

    by ArmenTanzarian ( 210418 ) on Wednesday January 21, 2004 @11:33AM (#8043226) Homepage Journal
    another short article [gcn.com] from GCN [gcn.com] on the subject.

    • ALL miss the point: IPsec (Score:4, Informative)

      by johnjones ( 14274 ) on Wednesday January 21, 2004 @01:05PM (#8044130) Homepage Journal
      ok

      all I really want is IPsec

      (and maybe MobileIP)

      imagine that all your IP conections are secure !
      screw that crap 802.11 security just let the router only allow IPsec connections and if you want to lock it down ask for the machines keys and only allow these

      why is this so hard ?

      IPsec is in all modern linux *BSD *ix MacOS and Win2k WinXP (win98 with download util)

      really I have not seen a laptop with a OS that could not use IPsec

      IPsec is manditory part of IPv6

      why do these people miss the point ?

      regards

      John Jones

  • Backward Compatability (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Will I be able to patch my ZX81 to understand the new protocol? Or will I have to upgrade?

  • Would it surprise anyone... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by _PimpDaddy7_ ( 415866 ) on Wednesday January 21, 2004 @11:35AM (#8043235)
    If China, South Korea, Japan move ahead of the US, with regard to broadband, the internet, and amount of homes hooked up to broadband, etc.?

    If so how will this change our direction, or would it?
    • Hasn't this already happened? Parts of europe too i think. US was like no. 10 on the broadband access list last time I checked... still pretty good on total internet access though.

    • Re:Would it surprise anyone... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Hott of the World ( 537284 ) on Wednesday January 21, 2004 @11:50AM (#8043376) Homepage Journal
      As long as companies feel perfectly fine in charging $60, $70, and even $100 USD for sub-quality cable service (or DSL), The US is going to remain behind.
      • Is "the US will be left behind" the new "think about the children"? I mean, since when are we in a competition to have the best technology possible, instead of the technology most appropriate for what we're doing with it?

        • Irrelevant... (Score:5, Insightful)

          by Pii ( 1955 ) <<gro.rebasthgil> <ta> <idej>> on Wednesday January 21, 2004 @01:08PM (#8044171) Journal
          While your point is not without merit (I'm a fan of choosing a technology based on its applicability, rather than its relative coolness), this is a little deeper than some "golly-gee-whiz fancy IP addressing."

          It's vital to Americans that the United States maintain it's lead as a technological innovator, because from a global economic perspective, what do we have left?

          We don't really build anything here anymore. We have gotten out of the business or agriculture (We could, even now, provide enough food to end world hunger, but we don't.). Metaphorically, we are becoming a nation of gurus and burger flippers. We have people that can afford expensive cars, and people that wash them.

          Our niche lies in development. If we are no longer the leader in that space, then the United States will be doomed to global mediocrity.

          Domestically, we already have a kind of class warfare between the "Haves" and the "Have nots" (I don't particularly subscribe to that... It's closer to "Haves" and "Have laters." Even poor Americans have televisions and refridgerators.). Having enjoyed a prosperous history, America as a nation could not stomache becoming a nation of "Have nots."

          IPv6 is coming... In some places, it's already arrived. In others, it'll be there Real Soon Now. It needs to find it's way here, and the sooner the better, for three reasons:

          • It's inevitable...
          • The US would be wise to stay on the cutting edge of technology from a global economic perspective...
          • The longer we delay, the greater the difficulty in making the transition.

          Making the switch today would be traumatic, because there are a lot of devices that need to be upgraded, modified, or otherwise reconfigured.

          Further delay will only mean that there are even more devices that will need to be changed in the future. The Internet continues to grow explosively.

          A conversion to IPv6 now would result in far less duplication of effort later.

    • Re:Would it surprise anyone... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by javilon ( 99157 ) on Wednesday January 21, 2004 @12:51PM (#8043990) Homepage
      Nowadays, the US seems to think that the only important thing is military power.

      • Nowadays, the US seems to think that the only important thing is military power.

        Perhaps, but our military power comes from high technology. The US does not have a huge population or a very large military force in terms of troops on the ground, but we do have technological superiority which allows those troops to be more effective. Some of this superiority includes communication technology. Remember that the internet started as a military project, as were some of the earliest computers.

        It therefore

  • Another driver... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by CaptainAlbert ( 162776 ) on Wednesday January 21, 2004 @11:36AM (#8043255) Homepage
    Not something I saw mentioned in the article links, but it's worth bearing in mind that the support of IPv6 is mandated in the protocol stack definitions of the 3GPP standards. This means, to cut a long story short, that all 3G telecoms kit (handsets, basestations and switchgear) will support IPv6 out of the box. At least in Europe and Japan.

    So, when it finally stops being vapourware, and assuming that people actually buy into this technology, I'd say that was a fairly good driver for other industries to adopt it too. Not looking forward to the transition though. :)

    • Re:Another driver... (Score:3, Informative)

      by garcia ( 6573 ) *
      So, when it finally stops being vapourware...

      Interesting that you feel it is vaporware when I have been using it for well over a year and it has been around (in use) for quite a bit longer than that.

      I guess there are multiple definitions of vaporware possible but, honestly, if a product is in use by more than a research team, I would consider it to be a current technology.
      • > Interesting that you feel it is vaporware

        OK, It's a fair cop. I actually work for a company that makes 3G basestations (hardware and software) for the European and Japanese markets, and we've been shipping them to the operators for years. But even though I have (in some ways, I am!) tangible evidence that the product exists, it still feels strangely like no-one's using it yet.

        Then again, I don't have a cellphone, broadband, digital TV or a DVD player. But my SuSE boxen all support IPv6, fershure.

        How

  • It's about time! (Score:5, Interesting)

    by W32.Klez.A ( 656478 ) * on Wednesday January 21, 2004 @11:37AM (#8043260) Homepage
    It's about time we move on from the archaic state of the internet we're at right now. Besides the content, nothing's really changed in 10 years, and it needs to. With the current prolonged influx of security problems caused by an infrastructure that was never meant to handle the things we do to it, I'd say it's about time someone big pushes IPv6.

    • Re:It's about time! (Score:3, Interesting)

      by MtViewGuy ( 197597 )
      I think there are two good reasons to start the phaseout of IPv4:

      1. The number of Internet-enabled devices out there are growing at an explosive rate. You really need the vastly larger number of IP addresses available in IPv6 for all those devices out there, even with modern router boxes.

      2. It might improve Internet security, since we might have a chance in IPv6 to trace the very specific IP address of the person and/or machine trying to cause security problems on the Internet.

  • All Chinese to me (Score:5, Funny)

    by upside ( 574799 ) on Wednesday January 21, 2004 @11:39AM (#8043275) Journal
    How did they manage to put six carriers in five? Perhaps if you use NAT you can fit six integers in five... Or is it CCT (Chinese Carrier Translation)? "Five key Chinese carriers, including..." 1. China Telecom 2. China Unicom 3. China Netcom/CSTNET 4. China Mobile 5. China RailCom 6. CERNET (China Education and Research Network) "Including" even implies there are more... OK, sorry. I'm tired.

  • IPv4 good enough? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by PatrickThomson ( 712694 ) on Wednesday January 21, 2004 @11:41AM (#8043288)
    OK, we don't have anough addresses. Ok, lets firewall and subnet. Outcome? I can't connect directly to my friends's computer, and I can't run games (or any other) servers. Decentralised P2P suffers similarly. Rock on IPv6! I have my own IP address, unlike about 1/2 the people at my university and all my friends at other universities, and it's damn useful. Rock on IPv6!

    • Re:IPv4 good enough? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by AKnightCowboy ( 608632 ) on Wednesday January 21, 2004 @12:09PM (#8043546)
      I can't connect directly to my friends's computer, and I can't run games (or any other) servers. Decentralised P2P suffers similarly.

      Well, speaking from a business standpoint, I couldn't care less if people can't connect directly to our workstations from the Internet. The machines we want people to talk to are on the DMZ. Everything else is clients and internal protected servers (file servers, databases, etc.). IPv6 won't catch on until firewall software is updated to interoperate with it unfortunately. Don't expect people to have a change of heart and to suddenly go back to the bad old days of every system being wide open on the wild west Internet.

      • IPv6 won't catch on until firewall software is updated to interoperate with it unfortunately.

        Most firewall software already does work with it. It is supported by linux, all the BSDs, Solaris, Win2k+, OS X. All the major router manufaturers support it. The only exception I can think of off the top of my head are those $50 disposable broadband routers that you get at consumer electronics places...
      • just because two computers can talk to each other directly doesn't mean they are "wide open on the wild west Internet". but you were speaking from a business standpoint. I'm speaking from a technical aspect as well as a community aspect. the control of who gets to publish information on the internet is restricted by things like NAT which doesn't allow direct connections, and rediculous Terms of Use by ISP that do not allow the running of servers on your paid for connection. Media companies like Time Warner

      • Re:IPv4 good enough? (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Rich0 ( 548339 )
        Right now I'm typing on a computer which is on a routable class-A IP address. You couldn't ping it if you wanted to - the firewall blocks any access except to a few proxy servers in the DMZ. However, if we ever had a merger we wouldn't have to run around remapping every subnet in the company as a result - our addresses are unique worldwide.

        IPv6 really is a solution to a lot of problems. You can assign a 16-bit subnet to every floor in your building and never worry about running out of IPs, and never hav
    • I have my own "live" IP address at my university, but it's totally firewalled, so it's just as bad :(

    • Re:IPv4 good enough? (Score:2, Informative)

      by jheiss ( 10829 ) *
      Amen, I pay $20 a month to my ISP for a static IPv4 IP (I know, it's highway robbery). Then I have to play games with iptables and DNAT to access things from the outside.

      freenet6 gives me a /48 IPv6 network (2^80 addresses) for free. And with 6to4 I can get another /48 network based on my one IPv4 address. Every one of my machines (and every square micron of my house for that matter) can have its own Internet reachable IP.

    • Re:IPv4 good enough? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by sapped ( 208174 ) <mlangenhoven@@@yahoo...com> on Wednesday January 21, 2004 @01:09PM (#8044190)
      The problem with this is the daylight robbery that ISP's engage in to provide these addresses to us. Unless prices come down significantly, my entire house will still be sitting behind a router with a single IP going off to my ISP.

      For the absurd price differences I will live with the inconvenience.

  • Vibrators? (Score:3, Funny)

    by illuin ( 113072 ) on Wednesday January 21, 2004 @11:41AM (#8043291)
    > somewhat hopeful research* suggesting that the average home contains 250 devices (toasters, electric toothbrushes, vibrators?)

    err... ummm... vibrators? I guess that's just further proof that porn really does run the internet!
    • Can you imagine the tech support nightmare?

      Hello? Support? Yes, I'm calling because my vibrator is offline... third time this week. What? Software update? No, I don't want it soft. Firmwhat update? Ok, whatever that is, I want it firm, better send that to me.

  • IPv8 (Score:2, Interesting)

    by GillBates0 ( 664202 )
    It's good to know people are already working [google.com] on IPv8 [ietf.org].

    Now's as good a time to start drawing up the drafts as any.

    • No IPv8 (Score:4, Informative)

      by crow ( 16139 ) on Wednesday January 21, 2004 @11:56AM (#8043430) Homepage Journal
      If you read the various followups to that posting you linked to, you'll see that there are two separate IPv8s. One was a proposal that competed with IPv6 and lost. It's dead. The other is a joke.

      So the deal is that there is not, in fact, a serious IPv8 effort underway.

    • A few quotes from the follow up emails

      write it off to loonies and sociopaths not taking their meds. - Randy Bush

      "IPv8" is a joke. Unfortunately it is a joke that has gone on too long and is still wasting people's time. - Brian Carpenter

      "The recent postings you have received, despite the use of the string "IPv8" and being posted to the IETF list, have nothing to do with this actual IPv8. Despite the use of the string "RFC" in these postings to the IETF list, they having nothing to do with any IETF R

      • V8 was invented by one of the denizens of Bell labs and the guy who funded ihnp4, and actually works. Because he refuses to let ISOC copyright his stuff and has been burned by the various I* groups he is somewhat of a pariah. However v8 actually works today and interoperates with v4 and has for years and is already in the Microsoft, Linux and BSD stacks.

        If you look at the "6 over 4" spec and the v8 spec you'll realize it's the same thing and was adopted several years back, they simlpy adopted v8 and change
    • Why IPv8? Why not IPv7?

      There is after all an IPv5 (the Internet Streaming Protocol).

  • IPv6 is dying (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 21, 2004 @11:44AM (#8043326)
    I'ts well known that *BSD has the best IPv6 support. Thus we can conclude that IPv6 is dying, if not dead. Once Al Gore and Tom Harkin endorse it, we'll know for sure.

  • IP6s problem is the numeric addresses r so complex (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Viol8 ( 599362 ) on Wednesday January 21, 2004 @11:44AM (#8043330) Homepage
    With ip4 its failry easy to set up a box yourself with dns, hosts file etc because of the simplicity of the numeric addresses. However good
    ip6 might be in other respects , in this respect however its a nightmare. A 128 bit number converted to hexadecimal is NOT a pretty site and leaves a huge scope for typos and other cock-ups.
    Ok , this isn't a reason not to use it but it should have been something the designers could have addressed other than just having :: as a shortcut for a block of zeros and leaving it at that.

    • Re:IP6s problem is the numeric addresses r so comp (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Zathrus ( 232140 ) on Wednesday January 21, 2004 @12:07PM (#8043536) Homepage
      The same charges were leveled at IPv4 back when it came out -- it was considerably longer than was considered necessary (32-bits? That's way too much space!), it's a far bigger number than is convienently held in short-term memory, and yet, according to you, it's simple.

      Funny how people adapt.

      Between that and the mystic thing called "cut and paste" that's available on pretty much every platform known to man nowadays, this is a real non-issue.
    • Well, by your post, you probably haven't grokked the true beauty of IPV6. There are a lot of mechanisms in place to address your issues. Host configuration will be done by querying an upstream router. The only people that really have to key in the huge hex addy are the root guys, maybe. Then they'll probably automate it or at least use cut-n-paste. But seriously, IPV6 is quite beautiful, and really has a lot of thought put into the headers and routing to make everything work seamlessly without massive
    • Oh for heaven's sake, that's a pretty lame excuse.

      I didn't find it particularly difficult to set my entire server network running with IPv6. DNS wasn't hard to set up (both forward and PTR). Routing was no more difficult than IPv4. My website is available over IPv6 [alioth.net] and even the forum is IPv6 aware (including having an IPv6 whois).

      Once it's set up in DNS, you seldom have to touch it again - that's what DNS is there for.
  • This is good news. It lets me just blacklist everything purporting to come from an IPv6 address, instead of having to figure out which netblocks are registered in China.

  • IPv6 is MUCH more than a replacement for IPv4 (Score:5, Informative)

    by anti-NAT ( 709310 ) on Wednesday January 21, 2004 @11:52AM (#8043386) Homepage

    Keith Moore, an author/co-author of a number of RFCs on IPv6 and other topics, posted the following to the IETF mailing list, regarding what IPv6 will enable and can be used for.

    The comment was in response to somebody's claim that residential users would be happy with NAT, and non-globally routable IP addresses for their "internal" networks.

    Re: dubious assumptions about IPv6 (was death of the Internet) [theaimsgroup.com]

    That's like saying residential telephone users don't need to have a phone number at which they can be reached. (after all, the purpose of their residential phones is to call businesses for the purpose of obtaining services, right?)

    There are lots of apps that would be valuable to residential users if residential users had reachable IP addresses. check the status of your alarm system, or your roast in the oven, or your freezer's inventory. Grab a picture from your baby-cam while you're out for dinner and have left the kid with the baby sitter. Reset the thermostat if you're going to be out of town longer than you thought. Do all of these from your portable phone/PDA which is running guess what? -- IPv6.

    Also, don't assume that IPv6 addresses will be used by people or their personal computers. IPv6 enables lots and lots of individually addressable devices which don't have to be associated with individuals. Every km of highway can have an addressable traffic sensor so that police and emergency crews know exactly when and where a traffic accident happened. Every streetlight can be monitored to see if it is functioning properly or if it needs service. Every traffic signal can be made individually controllable so that they can dynamically adapt to changes in traffic patterns. For reasons like this, the demand for IPv6 addresses won't be determined by some linear multiple of the number of humans on the planet.

    Finally, don't assume that IPv6 devices will require the support burdens we associate with PCs. PCs as we currently know them are dinosaurs. Appliances that talk to the network aren't going to need the same kind of technical hand-holding that PCs do (because they'd never succeed if they did), and neither will the devices that replace what we now think of as personal computers.

    IPv6 will eventually replace IPv4, but it's misleading to think of IPv6 as just a replacement for IPv4. By the time IPv6 replaces IPv4, we won't recognize the IPv6 network as something that resembles what the IPv4 network is used for today. Even though the underlying technology is very similar, IPv6 is really a new kind of network, one that enables things that were really never possible with IPv4 on a large scale.

  • Bottleneck (Score:2, Insightful)

    by savagedome ( 742194 )
    If you look at the OSes used to access Google (which is a good indicator of total OSes used), Win98 is listed at the top [google.com] with 27%. And with Microsoft extending [slashdot.org] support, it creates a speedbump.

  • Better security? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by GunR ( 246697 ) on Wednesday January 21, 2004 @11:58AM (#8043452)
    IPv6 may have a better and safer design, but have you ever considered the software that's going to use it? I see networkrelated security issues popping up "all the time" with IPv4 software. Now, what will happen when we do move over to IPv6, which is in fact a more complex protocol? I have a feeling we will be seeing quite a few security reports on not only the various stack implementations, but also on userspace programs.

    • Re:Better security? (Score:2, Insightful)

      by jheiss ( 10829 ) *
      Sure, there will be some issues to be worked out with the stacks. But this argument about IPv6 providing lots of opportunties for bugs in userspace apps seems specious to me. (I've seen others make it too, so I'm not just picking on you.) For example, in Java you generally need no code changes at all to support IPv6. Even in C you don't go poking around at IP addresses much. Mostly you just get a pointer to a addr struct of some sort and pass it along to the next system function without inspecting it.
    • OTOH, it could be a good thing to have complexity moved from userland programs over into a stable, actively maintained IPv6 imlementation.

  • Why is NAT a "bad thing"? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Dlugar ( 124619 ) on Wednesday January 21, 2004 @12:04PM (#8043509) Homepage
    I guess I'm not quite sure I "get it", but why is NAT necessarily a "bad thing"? Because it's not "how it's supposed to be"? Because it's klugey? Bad design? Insecure?

    I guess my thinking is, if I've got a house full of electronic devices (let's say a dozen computers, an IP-enabled toaster, fridge, television, etc.) I don't really need or want world-visible IP addresses on all of them. I'd like them to be just 10.* or whatever IP addresses, and if any communication ever needs to go on between them and the Internet they should necessarily go through some central house-server/router/firewall. I should have the option of having, say, three of the computers have world-visible IP addresses, but the rest having local 10.* addresses. But why make my toaster be visible to the Internet when, really, there's no need for him to be?

    Or am I missing something terribly here?

    Not to say that IPv6 isn't a good thing ... it basically needs to happen sooner or later. But what's wrong with IPv6 plus keeping NAT around? Or is it just the excitement of "We don't have to anymore!"?

    Dlugar
    • If you don't want your toaster/whatever routable from outside your home, how is NAT going to help you? It's not like you have to put a globally routable ip on a device just because it's not behind NAT. There's site local and link local IP addresses with IPv6, and the link local at least are always there, even if you put a global as well.

      Actually you have link local addresses with IPv4 as well. The net 169.254/16 must always be sent to your local interface regardless of your IP, and packets with it as sourc

    • it's not *per se* (Score:3, Informative)

      by RMH101 ( 636144 )
      ...but it's limiting.
      say you've 2 webservers behind NAT. you can't run them both on port 80 as the port forwarding has to go to one IP address or the other.
      or if you have 2 apps that use an overlapping port range - big problems.
      it just doesn't *scale* but for home use, sure, NAT does the job.

    • Re:Why is NAT a "bad thing"? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Hatta ( 162192 ) on Wednesday January 21, 2004 @12:25PM (#8043720) Journal
      There is absolutely no point in IPv6+NAT. If having your toaster publicly addressable bothers you, stick it behind a firewall and block the ports. Address translation and port blocking are completely orthogonal. It's only out of convenience that firewalls do both.
    • Imagine you are standing in your favourite supermarket, and you wonder if you should buy eggs, because you want to bake a cake for the weekend. With a public address for your fridge you could check remotely, if you have enough eggs at home. With a 10.* IP address you can't.

      Think about what an address is good for: to address something. Giving it an unique identifier, so your request goes to the right place. There are definitely more than 2^32 objects in the world to be addressed. Think about embedding phone
    • You just need to pick a 128 bit InterNAT address and the current criticisms about it go away. It's a lot more useful the the broken V6 [google.com] will ever be.
    • The problem is, as things are going, your main router/firewall/server ip is going to be dynamic unless you pay big $$$. You will be forbiden to run "servers" on it. And your bandwidth will be asimetric, so you use the internet to fetch information from a central server but no information flows from you to the network.

  • Also, there are more addresses! (Score:5, Informative)

    by Emil Brink ( 69213 ) on Wednesday January 21, 2004 @12:07PM (#8043529) Homepage
    There are good reasons to move to IPv6, including security, multicasting, simplified header structures, and better routing to name a few.

    Um, is this just an oversight, or is the poster so US-centered (s)he doesn't realize that one of the major reasons why IPv6 is interesting to us in that weird "foreign" part of the world is that is expands the address space?

    I don't recall how large the US allocation of IPv4 addresses is, but I'm pretty sure it's at least 25% of the space, and that's being conservative. Since the US doesn't even have 1/16th of the population, that's obviously b0rken, and IPv6 is a more or less natural fix.

    Now, I'm Swedish, and I'm sure we have enough IP addresses for our puny country, but the nations of Asia probably can't say the same. Thus, more interest in switching over sooner, and less in the US where there's no (or less) pressure from simply running out of addresses.

    • It is something like 75% acording to a previous slashdot rant about IPv6
    • ...one of the major reasons why IPv6 is interesting to us in that weird "foreign" part of the world is that is expands the address space?

      And it's really interesting in Asia, haven for spammers? Many sysadmins already block giant ranges of IPs from those countries from their mailservers today. With IPv6, the number will be exponentially vaster...

    • I consider the larger address space a bonus, but not really the primary reason to move to IPV6.

      A vast section of the world's population doesn't even electricity, let alone an interest in TCP/IP. They'd rather have indoor plumbing than pr0n. Considering that, I don't think that the US having 25% is out of line. Now, China and the rest of the far east certainly will benefit from more addresses, but they're dealing with it through NAT, etc. The problem with NAT, though, is that it makes the internet lopsi
    • The US portion of address space is probably considerably more than 25%. Look how many US companies or institutions have class A addresses.

      Speaking of class A address assignments... How many of them actually need nearly 17 million Internet-addressable IPs? It's this type of waste (both in assignment and initial design) that is causing the real crunch in IPV4 space.

  • Multicast comment (Score:2, Insightful)

    by webhat ( 558203 )
    Whether it is IPv4 or IPv6; multicast will not be useful until we stop building star shaped networks and build meshing network.

    Besides from the added bonus of making the networks failover. (c;

  • Sure, we all love the idea that IPv6 will empower nations that have not managed to accumulate so much address space, and we all love the idea that we may be able to provide corporations with a reasonable excuse not to deploy NAT boxes.

    But, before we rush headlong into support of radical IPv6 transformation, we must consider some of the disadvantages. First, there are the costs of migration. Interoperability with IPv4 is an absolute must, lest we make the same mistake that ISO did when it proposed CLNP/C

  • Yes, that's right... I think IPv6 is a stupid, stupid move.

    While the expanded address space is good, that is the only advantage I can see to IPv6. As a system admin, and one of the people responsible for moving my company to IPv6, I've taken a couple training courses on it, and I have found it wanting... alot.

    From an end user standpoint, IPv6 is no big deal. I'm not worried about that. But from a sysadmin standpoint, IPv6 is going to be an utter troubleshooting nightmare. The biggest problem that imme
    • However, you have more subnets than ever before (unless you're already working at a place with a /16 or larger). I've not yet worked anywhere where you'd have more than 65,000 logical subnets per site; autoconfiguration should deal with the issue of tracking IPs in use in a subnet, since you only manage the /64 network number by hand.

      For a large corporate network, you just firewall off connections to each network, then require that services you wish to expose have an extra address, which is opened up, and

    • Re:I despise IPv6 and I think it's horrid... (Score:5, Informative)

      by Alioth ( 221270 ) <no@spam> on Wednesday January 21, 2004 @01:02PM (#8044096) Journal

      The biggest problem that immediately jumps out at you with IPv6 is the fact that individual addresses in a subnet have absolutely no relation to each other. So John in the cube next to me will have an entirely different address than I do, and it will have no relation to me.


      I'm sorry, but that's unadulterated bullshit. There is absolutely nothing stopping you from assigning adjacent addresses, or using the phone number of the cube-owner, or any other addressing scheme you want for your IPv6 addressing scheme.

      For simplicity, on my server network, I simply assigned 2001:470:1f01:109::1 for the first machine, 2001:470:1f01:109::2 for the second, all the way onto the sixth, which (predictably) is 2001:470:1f01:109::6. I could have quite easily used the MAC address instead if I wanted to. Or used 2001:470:1f01:109::dead:beef and 2001:470:1f01:109::baad:f00d if I really wanted. Or set part of the last 64 bits to be telephone numbers. Or...and the list goes on.

      IPv6 doe NOT put any constraints on the way you assign addresses in a subnet.

      How you manage your network is up to you. If you chose lame IPv6 allocations, that's your fault, not the protocol's fault.
      • I'm going to take your word for it, that you can easily and quickly do that. However, my training comes in the form of a SUN network... and with SUN, it's based on the MAC; thus you have no control over the actual address assigned.

        I'm sure there *will be* ways to get Solaris to change the IPv6 address, according to the SUN provided training material and instructors, that's the "way it is"(tm).

        I'm not saying it's right. I'm not saying it's set in stone, but according to SUN, that's the way it's done... a
        • what you're really saying is that Sun's IPv6 implementation and tools are sadly lacking from a usability point of view. Shame on Sun.

          I've no doubt, Sun thought that a 'GUID' per address was a good idea, and that no-one would ever want anything different... but you describe exactly why you *would* want somethign else.

          Maybe its just that the tools for managing the addresses/network are poor.

          (lol. maybe you should upgrade to Microsoft :)

  • HowTo IPv6 for the Home (Score:3, Interesting)

    by maggard ( 5579 ) <michael@michaelmaggard.com> on Wednesday January 21, 2004 @12:59PM (#8044067) Homepage Journal
    So, for those of us working from home, how do we take advantage of IPv6?

    I've got two houses (different countries), each with a generic router/NAT box, cable modem service, and a coupla Mandrake, coupla WinXP, a MacOS 9, and a MacOS X box. Oh, and i the US a TiVo with Home Media Option. Also the sweetheart needs to boot into Win2K sometimes for work.

    I'm willing to swap out the router/NAT boxes if someone can point to ones that supports IPv6. I've already installed IPv6 on the XP boxes, I'm told it's straightforward on MacOS X, I assume it's no biggie for Mandrake. MacOS 9 - I recall Apple making some noise about IPv6 for it years ago but it's not a deal-breaker for me.

    The needs are the usual (web browsing/email/listening to streaming audio, etc.) plus I need some way of connecting the two houses so they appear on the same private network.

    Any suggestions? Boxes to buy? I strongly prefer to use a consumer router/NAT box over a PC for my gateway but don't see any of them mentioning IPv6 support, anyone got a firmware retrofit? How about getting IPv6 IP#s assigned while inside my ISP's (cable company) IPv4 space, without a fixed IP there? Is there an IPv6-friendly dynamic DNS service out there?

    Lotsa questions I know, but I bet lotsa folks would be willing to start getting experience at home if there were some "How-To-IPv6-for-the-Home" pages out there (I've looked, haven't found anything appropriate yet.)

    • Tunneling (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Detritus ( 11846 )
      Initially, I think what is needed is a cheap home IPv6 router that will automatically tunnel over the cable/DSL IPv4 network to a IPv6 gateway, run by another party. The cable/DSL operators may not like it, as many prohibit VPNs on their current networks. A ban may not be very enforceable.

      This echos the early days of the Internet, where IPv4 was layered on top of DECnet, SNA, X.25 and other protocols.

      I wouldn't expect to see IPv6 in a firmware update. You will probably have to buy a new box to get IPv6

    • I've always built my own firewalls (it's easy, and I trust them), and since about 1995 or 1996, they've had IPv6 support.

      I had a tunnel over my cable to the 6bone via http://www.freenet6.net/ ...but I recently shut my cable off so I need to bring it up over DSL, just haven't got around to it.

      OS X configures up IPv6 by default, as far as I can tell. My router solicitations help, of course. I've got two IPv6 subnets (wired and wireless). All's well.

  • #1 Reason to Move to IPv6 (Score:5, Funny)

    by cymen ( 8178 ) <cymenvig.gmail@com> on Wednesday January 21, 2004 @02:45PM (#8045707) Homepage
    There are good reasons to move to IPv6, including security, multicasting, simplified header structures, and better routing to name a few.

    And the number one reason to move to IPv6 is so we can stop having so many stories about it here! Please, for the love of all that is good, we must adopt IPv6 before slashdot is buried beneath a tsunami of IPv6 stories.

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