U.S. Government to Adopt IPv6 in 2008 284
IO ERROR writes "The U.S. Government is set to transition to IPv6 in June 2008, according to Government Computer News: 'In the newest additions to the IPv6 Transition Guidance, the CIO Council's Architecture and Infrastructure Committee has provided a list of best practices and transition elements that agencies should use as they work to meet the deadline. The latest additions, (MS Word) released in May, are a compilation of existing recommendations and best practices gathered from the Defense Department, which has been testing and preparing for the transition for years, the private sector, and the Internet research and development community.'"
Re:Deployed!?! (Score:5, Insightful)
The government will never be on its own, there are too many corporations sucking at its teat who will need to step into line.
Note how this works in re: MA trying to force open standards for anyone it does business with.
Stats on IP usage? (Score:5, Insightful)
2008? (Score:5, Insightful)
As the CIO Council and Office of Management and Budget help map out the June 2008 transition to IP Version 6, perhaps the biggest challenge is that they're entering unfamiliar territory.
In the newest additions to the IPv6 Transition Guidance, the council's Architecture and Infrastructure Committee has provided a list of best practices and transition elements that agencies should use as they work to meet the deadline.
So the government has a year-and-a-half to meet this deadline? Forgive the cynicism, but given that they have a loose set of guidelines and so many systems that would need conversion, I think they're being a tad optimistic. Kudos for trying this, but I won't be surprised when it takes until 2010.
Re:Deployed!?! (Score:3, Insightful)
Good point, that worked really well with GOSIP [wikipedia.org] which is why we're all using OSI now.
What, we're not? Hmm.
IPv6 Adoption (Score:4, Insightful)
Digitac
Re:Deployed!?! (Score:5, Insightful)
The government will never be on its own, there are too many corporations sucking at its teat who will need to step into line.
Agreed. Who writes this stuff? ISPs already have management networks running IPv6 and big players like Comcast ran out of unique IPv4, for their cable modem pools and have completed their migration to IPv6. China is on the boat and most network gear deals with both just fine. How exactly is the US government going to be on its own here?
Re:Stats on IP usage? (Score:2, Insightful)
1.upto(254){ |a|
1.upto(254){ |b|
1.upto(254){ |c|
1.upto(254){ |d|
TryExploit '#{a}.#{b}.#{c}.#{d}'
}
}
}
}
And then have your zombies run this. The exploit would then run this. etc. etc.. and the Internet craps outs.
Aside: Yes, starting at 1 is wrong, but this is for demonstration purposes only!!!!
Now, with IPv6, you can't hit another IP address ever using this method. You cannot bring down the Internet like you can with IPv4 because you will never be able to find another active IP address using a random number. And you certainly cannot iterate over the entire IP address space in a few minutes, hours or days.
You do not need NAT to hide your IP. That's what you have proxies and firewalls are for. Furthermore, you can NAT IPv6 if you really want to. There is no magic behind it.
Re:What are the Downsides to IPv6? Anyone? (Score:5, Insightful)
I am not amazingly versed in this issue but several things stand out immediately to anyone who has a little networking experience.
I'm sure someone with a little more knowledge, and/or a little more imagination, can come up with others.
Re:Stats on IP usage? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Deployed!?! (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:IPv6 Adoption (Score:3, Insightful)
Perhaps this is what it would take to get IPv6 in place - MS to say 'we will stop supporting IPv4 in a year's time'. Watch all the computer companies scramble to update their software (and hardware - obviously you'll need to buy the updated versions) and then it'll happen. Otherwise, we're going to be stuck with IPv4 for a very long time to come.
Good news, bad news (Score:5, Insightful)
The good news: long term, I think IPv6 is desirable. Thus, I like seeing a large organization pave the way. Let them get the kinks out. Let them find out what all goes wrong. Let them blaze the trail so we can ride on their coattails. Let them incur the big expense.
The bad news: Wait a minute. "Them?" Oh shit, it's the US government. I'm a US citizen. Argh, that's my expense. D'oh!
Re:IPv6 Adoption (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Stats on IP usage? (Score:5, Insightful)
-c
Re:IPv6 Adoption (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:What are the Downsides to IPv6? Anyone? (Score:5, Insightful)
geographic addressing. it was unnecessarily denounced as anti-provider
and socialist.
Re:IPv6 Adoption (Score:3, Insightful)
Streaming video and Video-over-IP is going to make this even a bigger challenge: suppose you want to do IP video, and watch a different channel on one TV than you do on another? With only one externally-facing IP address, this could be quite a challenge; all the kludges that you'd need to make something like this function through NAT go away when you have IPv6 and every device in the house can be globally addressable (if you want it to be--people are still going to want firewalls, obviously). Same with multiple SIP streams. Even if you can get a SIP phone working through NAT, it becomes almost exponentially more complex to add another SIP ATA (say you wanted to have more than one "line"). Unless you can tell the headend to route the second line to a different port on your one externally-facing IP address, and then tell the NAT box to route that to a different internal IP, you're out of luck. People are going to want to do stuff like that as the technology becomes more mature.
The cable TV companies aren't going to be very interested from the video perspective, but they might be interested because of the voice possibilities, and the telephone companies who want to deliver video over IP might see easier implementations with IPv6 as well.
More than all this though are the "killer apps" that we don't even know about right now, and that we'll never know about without IPv6 and heavily wired, addressable homes. There are all sorts of neat things that we can't do now, or are hard to do (which is bascially the same thing if you're Joe User) that become a lot easier when everything has a unique address. To say that there aren't any benefits from switching to IPv6 is to say that we can imagine all the possibilities that might arise when the capabilities exist, and that to me is a bit of an arrogant statement. (Note I'm not saying you said that, but I see it as an implicit assumption in a lot of other anti-IPv6 blanket statements.)
Re:Stats on IP usage? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:IPv6 Adoption (Score:5, Insightful)
Comcast exhausted the entire 10 net last year and are deploying IPv6 for their management addresses. Just check out their presentation at the recent NANOG (North American Network Operators Group) titled "IPv6 @ Comcast Managing 100+ Million IP Addresses" [nanog.org]http://www.nanog.org/mtg-0606/pdf/alain-durand.pd
Comcast, themselves, are saying the exact opposite of what you are claiming. They use private address space, but that's NOT the way it's going to stay. The address shortage is a pointed issue with them. They're already moving to IPv6. IPv6 to the customer is on the horizon.
You loose. Thank you for playing.
There's Money To Be Made Here (Score:2, Insightful)
If the U.S. Government is about to push a major IpV6 initiative, there could be some money to be made here.
http://www.realmeme.com/roller/page/realmeme?entr
Re:Favorite part (Score:3, Insightful)
With IPv4 there are users who could have a
With IPv6 you take the first 48 bits and those always point to a unique end user. Any smaller subnet is going to be handled by this user's router, so routing tables just became a lot smaller, even if the addresses are four times as large.
This "anti-fragmentation" of course consumes chunks of address space without using every one of those addresses. Of course users could do with, for example,
Re:Stats on IP usage? (Score:2, Insightful)
Not true. IBM uses 9.0.0.0/8 internally for practically everything. All they have to do is publish routes and open the firewalls and their Intranet becomes Internet.
Re:Stats on IP usage? (Score:4, Insightful)
Setup a firewall, which is the proper way of doing it in the first place. The security benefits of NAT are incidental, not intentional. NAT also makes it difficult for network administrators to diagnose and isolate network problems.
Comcast IPv6 Plans (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Stats on IP usage? (Score:3, Insightful)