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The Night the IETF Shut Off IPv4
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Friday March 14, @03:22PM
from the fun-with-switches dept.
from the fun-with-switches dept.
IP Freely writes "At this year's Internet Engineering Task Force meeting in Philadelphia, conference organizers shut off IPv4 for an hour. Surprisingly, chaos did not ensue. 'After everyone got his or her system up and running, many people started looking for IPv6-reachable web sites, reporting those over Jabber instant messaging — which posed its own challenges in the IPv6 department. I was surprised at the number of sites and wide range of content available over IPv6. Apart from — obviously — IPv6-related sites; they ranged from "the largest Gregorian music collection in Internet" to "hardcore torrents." Virtually none of the better known web destinations were reachable over IPv6. That changed when ipv6.google.com popped into existence.'"
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Firehose:The night the IETF shut off IPv4 by Anonymous Coward
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Hardcore Torrents (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah, that's great but... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Yeah, that's great but... (Score:5, Funny)
I keep waiting for somebody to say "This thread is useless without pictures."
Careful what you ask for. (Score:5, Funny)
Okay... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Okay... (Score:5, Funny)
Yes, I tried. And yes, I just lost geek points. (-1)
"Natalie Portman + Linux" (+1)
We'll call it even, OK?
Re:Okay... (Score:5, Funny)
I think you probably lose another geek point for bad syntax on that one. You likely wanted
"Natalie Portman" + Linux
Instead. We'll take your card at the door...
Re:Okay... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Okay... (Score:5, Informative)
I guess I was expecting too much, but the sites that are indexed appear to be just the regular ipv4 sites, so they have ipv6 enabled the web frontend to the search engine but not the back end that goes and crawls the web.
Re:Okay... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Okay... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Okay... (Score:5, Informative)
Hi. I work (among other things) with IPv6 in Google, although I was only distantly released to this launch (some of my code was used in the monitoring components). It's nice to see we're getting attention :-)
You're entirely right that at the moment, only web search has an AAAA record. (However, with some trickery, you can get several other Google services running too -- just add /etc/hosts lines to the same IP, and you'll probably be able to run Maps, GMail and several others over IPv6.) We don't yet crawl, send or receive e-mail, or support GTalk over IPv6, and we definitely cannot guarantee anything about the uptime of the IPv6 versions of our services. (We've had a few years to make a production-grade IPv4 network, give us some time to make it IPv6-ready too!) Think of it as the first baby step; although we don't have a roadmap published (we almost never talk about future products in Google) I think it's pretty safe to say that there will be more.
Whether there should be services that are not available over IPv4, though, is an entirely different discussion. If you had a cool service and could offer it to the world, would you keep it away from 99.9% of the Internet just because you could?
/* Steinar */
- Software engineer, Google Norway
Re:Okay... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Okay... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Okay... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Okay... (Score:5, Funny)
Wow, that's obscure.
IPv5 (Score:5, Interesting)
(When it comes to Linux support for protocols, it's a popular platform for early developers, but maintenance can be an issue. enSKIP and SGI's STP code are abandonware, the real-time network driver for RTAI is infrequently updated, and the GAMMA Active Messages driver is seriously stalled in a number of areas. Many updates to Web100 have just been kernel increment updates, not bugfixes or added features. I don't recall seeing any support for VIA - which is fair enough, given it's dead - or iWarp. Linux' QoS supports RED, but neglected BLUE, GREEN, BLACK, WHITE and PURPLE the last time I looked.)
Re:Okay... (Score:5, Informative)
Basically you can either buy a cisco and upgrade to an ISP that'll route ipv6 (that's the neatest way of doing it, but is expensive and limits your ISP choice), or if you can get hold of an old WRT54G you can install a custom firmware that supports ipv6 and create a tunnel to a tunnel broker somewhere - it'll be much slower (tunnel latency is typically 300ms+ for the first hop because there are so few of them) but you'll be 'on' the ipv6 internet.
I was there (Score:5, Informative)
Anyway, after statically configuring DNS servers, things were very smooth. Google et al worked, I could access entire IPv4 web via sixxs.org (just go http://slashdot.org.sixxs.org/ [sixxs.org] to access Slashdot via IPv6), I could SSH to my home servers...only things that seemed a bit odd were failing reverse DNSes on some hops when running traceroute. Jabber worked, IRC worked.
Great experience and experiment.
Re:I was there (Score:5, Interesting)
IPv6 was designed o that stateless autoconfig resulted in routable addresses.
Informing client about DNS, NTP etc servers is just icing on cake.
The primary purpose is accounting (And insert whatever Orwellianisms you want here). Especially in enterprise networks. ISPs also are interested, to provide equivalent functionality to DHCPv4 "option 82" or similar ones that tie specific IP to specific user or at least DSL connection. So basically the driver is requirement to have managed IPv6 addressing without random hosts just deciding whatever they want to use (EUI-64, CGAs, whatever). In fact, the recent trend seems to be that when deploying network, DHCPv6 is not only preferred option, it seems to become the *only* allowed option. (Basically: Filter traffic so that only the DHCPv6-allocated address is allowed to communicate.)
Re:DHCPv6 (Score:5, Informative)
For example, if I get a complaint about a laptop a few days after the event, how am I supposed to find that host once it's moved onto another network? Are people seriously saying I should have to walk every single router neighbor table (or arp table, if we're talking v4) looking for a specific 64-bit number? The network I work on has literally thousands of routers & switches. That's simply a non-starter. With DHCP, I at least have a > 50% chance of finding the MAC of a host (and where it is now) with a simple query.
In short, business needs are driving it. Almost every discussion I've seen of IPv6 for large enterprises (not ISPs) has assumed that DHCPv6 will be used, and that autoconf + zeroconf will not.
More IPv6 sites here (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.sixxs.net/wiki/Category:IPv6-specific_content [sixxs.net]
and there is also some other 'Cool IPv6 stuff' listed on the Sixxs web site:
http://www.sixxs.net/misc/coolstuff/ [sixxs.net]
Slashdot is not available over IPv6 (Score:5, Informative)
Here is my list of sites that I was able to reach using native IPv6
using IE worked:
ipv6.google.com
www.ripe.net
www.apnic.net
www.stupi.net
www.arin.net
www.icann.org
www.nlnetlabs.nl
Failed foillowing sites did not work
www.cisco.net/com
www.microsoft.com
www.speakeasy.net
slashdot.org
news.bbc.co.uk
www.mbl.is
www.cnn.com
www.comcast.com/net
news.com.com
www.ibm.com
I'm going to start my own internet! (Score:5, Funny)
Finding things in IPv6 Cyberspace... (Score:5, Funny)
"So what's the Gregorian music website?"
It's the little azure ball to the south of the stepped scarlet pyramid of the Eastern Seaboard Fission Authority burning beyond the green cubes of Mitsubishi Bank of America.
I highly recommend using an Ono-Sendai Cyberspace 7 computer deck.
Stay away from Sense/Net if you're a n00b, or you're likely to get iced.
-- Terry