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An Introduction to IPv6 352

Posted by CmdrTaco from the unless-you're-to-smart-for-it dept.
Playboy writes "Here is a great introduction to IPv6 in general, the technological background, the reasons for the move and the effects this will have on networks. Understandable for network novices like me but still includes many details on the technological side of things."
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An Introduction to IPv6 More

An Introduction to IPv6

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  • yet another worthless article about IPv6 (Score:4, Insightful)

    by garcia ( 6573 ) * on Thursday September 09, 2004 @03:20PM (#10204434)
    Introduction to IPv6 #1004040... This has been brought up every six months or so for quite some time and I usually post the same shit about how it's not practical at this time period for much other than reverse DNS on IRC. But this "article" is yet another worthless explanation of the same old shit.

    Take for example the following IPv6 address: 43FB:0000:0000:0000:0000:BB3F:A0A0:0000 This could be shortened to 43FB::BB3F:A0A0:0 instead. Now you might ask: "What's up with the double colon?" If you thought that, good for you. You've seen something many people would not have seen on their first try. The double colon (aka "::") signifies that we have removed a series of hexadecimal blocks from the address. These will always be contiguous zeros. AKA "0000:0000:0000:0000" can be shortened to just "::". Therefore when you see the double colon in an IPv6 address, it can be automatically assumed that they are all zeros.

    Ahh yes, "simplifying IPv6 addresses". No, there is nothing simple about remembering those addresses (haven't there been studies that say 7-10 numbers in a row is about all we can remember?) So here we have 10+ numbers and letters that don't make much sense (yeah some people have gotten vanity IPv6 addresses like ABCD::BEEF::). Nothing is simplified there until you get the DNS up and running for it (not that this is hard or anything but it isn't exactly easy)

    It is true that IPv6 is not human friendly; however, in the long run, it will help solve a lot of issues with the current shortage of available IPv4 addresses on the internet.

    Yeah, the "shortages"... Just tell the people hoarding all the damn addresses to hand them over. Sorry but MIT, Apple, etc, as much as I respect their contributions to the human race, do not need a Class A. Allow for the redistribution of the IPs and we should be good to go for quite some time.

    Be thankful people don't have unlimited IPs in their house. Most people that want to have multiple computers connected to the Internet use a NAT router and at least protect themselves SOMEWHAT from the outside threats. Can you imagine what would happen if all the Comcast retards were straight to the Net with their own IP on each computer?

    ISPs make some good money (hell mine gets $5/mo more out of me for an additional IP) selling off static/dynamic IP space. You think Comcast is going to move for a switch when they make $10/mo per extra IP?

    • Re:yet another worthless article about IPv6 (Score:5, Funny)

      by stratjakt ( 596332 ) on Thursday September 09, 2004 @03:37PM (#10204668) Journal
      Studies show that monkeys can be trained to remember 10 numbers.

      You're not dumber than a monkey are you? /simpsons

    • Re:yet another worthless article about IPv6 (Score:5, Insightful)

      by smclean ( 521851 ) on Thursday September 09, 2004 @03:40PM (#10204718) Homepage
      I think you are being just a liiitle overly pessemistic here.

      Who cares if its card to remember an IPv6 address? Do you really memorize multiple IPs from multiple subnets that often? I can personally only think of 2 subnets I have memorized right now, and I work as a system admin full time.

      As for the shortages, you think that it's a good idea to have scarcity in the IP market just so people will be encouraged to run NAT? I think its presumptious of you to force conditions on me, personally I'd love to have IPs for each machine in my house, but I can't because IP addresses are hard to come by.

      And your last point, yes, ISPs are scumbags, but it seems that the fact that they price gouge for IPs would make you for IPv6, not against it.

      • As for the shortages, you think that it's a good idea to have scarcity in the IP market just so people will be encouraged to run NAT? I think its presumptious of you to force conditions on me, personally I'd love to have IPs for each machine in my house, but I can't because IP addresses are hard to come by.

        Sysadmins and regular Slashdot readers are in the minority. Personally I'd rather have the Comcast weenies behind a single firewall... Then I wouldn't have to block entire /16's to stop their worms f
        • As a Comcast customer, I resemble that remark! :) Anyway, there aren't any other options in this area for something reasonably cost effective, for the bandwidth that I get. There's a large wireless network in the nearby area, but they won't deal with individuals, and barely offer better than 56k dialup speeds.

          As someone who wishes they weren't supporting Comcast, and is reasonably technically-oriented, what alternatives could anybody suggest?

          -Jesse
        • That's fine, but they shouldn't be forced into that position because of a actual limit of IP addresses, they should be forced into that position because that's how Comcast sets them up, and they don't know how to change it.

          Again, if Comcast customers are required to run NAT in order to have multiple machines online, and if I am a Comcast customer, then I am requried to run NAT due to other peoples' ignorance, and I don't like that.

        • Re:yet another worthless article about IPv6 (Score:4, Insightful)

          by jadavis ( 473492 ) on Thursday September 09, 2004 @06:59PM (#10207194)
          That's another "restrict their freedom for their own good" argument.

          The internet is successful because there is little central control (aside from DNS). When you start trying to solve other people's problems by mandating network policy, you end up with the "smart network, dumb terminal" philosphy of the phone network.

          The internet doesn't work when Joe can't connect to Jane because they're both behind NAT. By discouraging IPv6, and therefore forcing NAT upon large parts of the internet, you drastically limit the number of possible connections that users can make.

          Just because browsing and email work fine behind NAT doesn't mean NAT isn't limiting other new applications of the internet. And just because you can't think of new applications doesn't mean that the millions of people trapped behind NAT can't.

          In fact, people already have, and they get stuck behind NAT all the time. Game servers, P2P apps, etc.

    • Be thankful people don't have unlimited IPs in their house. Most people that want to have multiple computers connected to the Internet use a NAT router and at least protect themselves SOMEWHAT from the outside threats. Can you imagine what would happen if all the Comcast retards were straight to the Net with their own IP on each computer?

      People are going to buy some sort of all-in-one switch to connect their home computers to the internet as well as to each other, and that device will undoubtedly have a

    • Sorry but MIT, Apple, etc, as much as I respect their contributions to the human race, do not need a Class A. Allow for the redistribution of the IPs and we should be good to go for quite some time
      last time i checked, there were only 4 class A's left (stanford was the fifth, but they gave theirs up a few years ago i believe)... so thats ~70mil addresses to give back. i dont believe that would makes us "good to go for quite some time"

    • Re:yet another worthless article about IPv6 (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Have Blue ( 616 ) on Thursday September 09, 2004 @03:58PM (#10204990) Homepage
      Be thankful people don't have unlimited IPs in their house. Most people that want to have multiple computers connected to the Internet use a NAT router and at least protect themselves SOMEWHAT from the outside threats. Can you imagine what would happen if all the Comcast retards were straight to the Net with their own IP on each computer?

      Not all that much different from today, for 2 reasons:
      • 0wned PCs getting abused tend to max out the connections they are attached to. Once that happens, it doesn't matter if the traffic is coming from 1 PC or a hundred- only 1 upstreams' worth of bad packets are getting onto the net.
      • I would wager that the vast majority of people who tend to get 0wned have only 1 computer. Any house with 2, 3, or more probably has at least one person in it who knows about security.


      ISPs make some good money (hell mine gets $5/mo more out of me for an additional IP) selling off static/dynamic IP space. You think Comcast is going to move for a switch when they make $10/mo per extra IP?

      If anything, they would take this chance to wage a renewed campaign of "you don't really need that router, please buy multiple IPv6 addresses".
      • I would wager that the vast majority of people who tend to get 0wned have only 1 computer. Any house with 2, 3, or more probably has at least one person in it who knows about security.

        I'll take that wager. It would be interesting to see the distribution of security experts to households with computers. Sure, some households may have folks that know enough to go to windowsupdate every couple of weeks, but I'll bet you that qualified security professionals are quite scarce, and there certainly isn't any pr

      • Any house with 2, 3, or more probably has at least one person in it who knows about security.

        I'll take that wager too.

        Unfortunately I know of more then a few households with multiple computers that were no better off then houses with single computers. In some cases it was worst because they were useing WiFi without so much as wep enabled. In most cases the computer salesmen had sold them on the idea that "They didn't have to worry because of the firewall." As a result I was there to remove the spam bots
    • Most people that want to have multiple computers connected to the Internet use a NAT router and at least protect themselves SOMEWHAT from the outside threats.

      Again, NAT does not enhance security. It just doesn't. I don't understand why people think it does. The thing that enhances security is your firewall. So instead of pretending like you get security because connections aren't mapped in, you ship home routers with a rule that says no connections may be established from the ``outside'' to the ``insi

  • I'll just wait.... (Score:5, Funny)

    by callipygian-showsyst ( 631222 ) on Thursday September 09, 2004 @03:21PM (#10204449) Homepage
    I'll just wait for W. Richard Steven's book on IPV6. That'll explain everything.

  • Not a bad start...but a couple of things on IPv6.. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Agent Green ( 231202 ) * on Thursday September 09, 2004 @03:21PM (#10204454)
    It's not a bad introduction, but since this is slashdot, I've got a couple of things that I want to point out:

    The article suggests that DHCP will no longer be necessary. This is not necessarily true. IPv6 autoconfiguration will get you an address to get onto the net at large, but it will not give you your DNS servers, time servers, or any number of goodies that DHCP is capable of serving up. Autoconfiguration does remove the neeed to define all kinds of crazy scopes, but it doesn't help with other configurable options.

    There is exists a problem with multihoming small entities that need provider diversity in IPv6. Some companies are assigning each customer their own NLA, or /48s, giving the customer 16 bits of addressing power. However, customers of Tier 2 ISPs will only get a couple SLAs or so. If I am a small business with one of the SLAs, there is still the problem of BGP multihoming with this address space, and this absolutely needs to be resolved in the not-so-distant future. I don't think there's a facility where I can go to ARIN and request my own /48 to annouce, say, between Level 3, MCI, and AT&T. While this might not make a difference to most people, it is a problem on the transport side of the house.

    • Re:Not a bad start...but a couple of things on IPv (Score:5, Funny)

      by segfault7375 ( 135849 ) on Thursday September 09, 2004 @03:28PM (#10204550)

      You seem to understand the technical issues very well... Sorry, but since this is /. you must leave this discussion immediately.

    • Re:Not a bad start...but a couple of things on IPv (Score:5, Informative)

      by liam193 ( 571414 ) * on Thursday September 09, 2004 @04:07PM (#10205112)
      Actually some of those issues are covered in IPv6. There is a new address type called an any-cast address. The idea, which will be interesting to see how it's implimented, is that all DNS servers will use an single any-cast address. The routers will somehow be told that this any-cast exists on this particular machine. When someone needs a DNS lookup they will use the hard-code any-cast address for DNS that everyone else in the world uses; however, instead of everyone hitting the same machine, they will hit the "closest" machine with that any-cast address. The same can be true for NTP, etc. Basically these are services that do not require that you have any particular device, just one of any of the ones in the world... preferably the closest or least busy.
    • IPv6 autoconfiguration will get you an address to get onto the net at large

      Almost. I got a /64 from Hurricane Electric [he.net] into my FreeBSD firewall/router. The problem is that I have three distinct subnets from that router:

      1. My LAN
      2. A DMZ
      3. My WLAN

      Autoconfig seems to require a /64 or larger netblock, but each of those segments necessarily has to be smaller than the /64 I was given. Even if I only used two bits to identify each local subnet, the resulting /66s would be too small for autoconfig to wor

  • idiot (Score:5, Funny)

    by BoldAC ( 735721 ) on Thursday September 09, 2004 @03:21PM (#10204458)
    I didn't understand why we needed IP6 until one of the guys at work described why he wanted each of his light switches to have its own IP address...

    Idiots... ...that's why we need IP6.

    (just kidding, boss)

    AC

  • Poor planning (Score:5, Insightful)

    by MikeMacK ( 788889 ) on Thursday September 09, 2004 @03:23PM (#10204482)
    The simple answer is that it is due to the very poor planning in the creation and implementation of IPv4 coupled with the unexpected explosive expansion of the internet.

    Was it poor planning? The article states that there was an unexpected explosive expansion of the Internet. I believe it's like the Y2K problem, they didn't think their programs would still be in use around 2000, so they only needed to store a two digit year. The same happened here, they didn't realize the Internet would become the World Wide Web, the New Economy, etc. Hell, even Bill Gates didn't see it coming.

    • Hell, even Bill Gates didn't see it coming.

      Of course he didn't. He always said, "640K IP addresses should be enough for anyone."

    • I thought it amazing that the designers of IP carved out a 32-bit address rather than 16. When there was just a couple of universities on the internet, who woulda though 4 billion addresses would eventually be needed? But our author says with IP v6, we get enough addresses for every person on the planet to have 10 of their own. Let's see... 5 billion people, 10 addresses each... 50 billion? IP v6 only offers up 10 times the address space? I don't think so!

    • Re:Poor planning (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Neil Watson ( 60859 )
      Not enough organizationgs utilizing NAT. Also, many organizations in the USA have huge blocks of IPs reserved that they could never possibly use. I seem to recall reading that one university has an entire class A block.

  • Home (Score:4, Funny)

    by Rubberpants.net ( 804718 ) on Thursday September 09, 2004 @03:23PM (#10204485) Homepage
    There's no place like 0:0:0:0:0:0:0:1

    • and its theres no place like ::1

      anyway from tfa: " Another positive outcome of IPv6 will be better internet routing using QoS, Quality of Service, which routes packets based on priority. So for example, if one person is pinging a server and another is downloading a file, the one pinging will have less priority in their data transmission than the one downloading a file because the user who is downloading a file from has created a data stream which will automatically gain more priority over the simple ICMP
      • and is it just me or does QoS on the backbone seam like a bad idea?

        Out of curiosity, why do you think this is a bad idea? It is impossible to layer QoS on top of something which treats all packets equally, and there are legitimate uses for QoS, like VoIP and video conferencing. Furthermore, when the bandwidth is saturated it is better for somethings to work and some not then to have everything jammed up.

      • Re:Home (Score:2)

        by Cato ( 8296 )
        Of course, IPv4 is just as capable as IPv6 of doing QoS, and in fact most provider IP networks outside the Internet already offer DiffServ QoS. The 'IPv6 enables QoS' myth is almost as strong as the 'IPv6 has better security' one - IPSec was invented for IPv6, but it's been deployed widely on IPv4.

        Fortunately, the explosion in home networks, peer to peer, WiFi laptops and smartphones (particularly 3G) will be enough to make IPv6 happen, sooner or later.
    • Shouldn't that be ::1:0? Damn IPv6 shortcuts, take less than 20 seconds to type.

  • Typo? (Score:4, Funny)

    by TonyTheTiger ( 156325 ) on Thursday September 09, 2004 @03:26PM (#10204521)
    Is that a typo in the department line or is it intentional?

    Either way it's hilarious.
    • Seems reasonable:

      Boss: I just had to cut your budget by 28% to finance the new company jet. By the way, can you deploy all of our servers on IPv6 and have them penetration tested by next Tuesday?
      Me: *whack*
      Boss: Hey, that smarts!

  • I for one... (Score:3, Funny)

    by Artie_Effim ( 700781 ) on Thursday September 09, 2004 @03:27PM (#10204536)
    I for one, welcome our new 128 bit overlords!

  • Here's hoping. (Score:4, Funny)

    by r00k123 ( 588214 ) <borenste AT student DOT umass DOT edu> on Thursday September 09, 2004 @03:30PM (#10204580)
    from the unless-you're-to-smart-for-it dept.

    Please, oh please, let that be a joke...

  • Quoth the article:
    Nats will also no longer need to be used as there will no longer be a need for IP address conservation since there will now be enough IPv6 addresses available for each person on the planet to have 10 of their very own.

    I might be mistaken, but I thought I'd heard that IPv6 provides more than enough IP addresses to have one for every atom in the universe. Correct me if I'm wrong.
    • Well, it is estimated that there are ~10^80 particles in the entire universe. Meanwhile there are ~2^128 addresses in IPv6.

      So, since 2^128 > 10^80, then yes.
    • Yes, there are 2^128 IPv6 addresses, which accoring to bc is 340282366920938463463374607431768211456. But estimates are that there are on 6+ billion people on earth, and if they are to have 10 addresses each, that is still only 2^36

      I gave up reading the artical at that point. The author has obviously no idea what he is talking about.

    • Hardly. Looking at the whole address space, keep in mind not all of it is usable, it is 128 bits in size. This translates to roughly 3.40e38 unique numbers.

      Now, 12 grams of Carbon-12 is one mole, or 6.02e23 atoms. 3.40e38 moles of Carbon-12 is 6.78e12 kilograms.

      Now the mass of the earth is 5.97e24 kg, so it's not nearly enough to give every atom in the earth even, but it is quite a lot.

      Note - it's been too long since my last Chem or math class, so my numbers may be off. If they are, you can go ahead

  • IPv6 by 2008? Who's he kidding? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by BridgeBum ( 11413 ) on Thursday September 09, 2004 @03:32PM (#10204608)
    If this is a measure of when people will start using IPv6, the answer is today. It's already there. Every major TCP/IP stack out there supports IPv6. Tunnel networks exist through IPv4. Internet 2 [internet2.edu] uses it exclusively.

    When are corporations going to start moving to IPv6? Who knows...that will depend on individual needs, but in general, large corporations aren't going to see a big need to move towards IPv6 any time soon. Without end user by in, who is going to 'force' people to use IPv6?

    Yes, IPv4 space is running out. It has been for a long time. That's why Network Address Translation [faqs.org] and private address space [faqs.org] are so common in today's world. They may be hacks, but they do the trick. Where's the business case involved in reorganizing major networks?

    • Re:IPv6 by 2008? Who's he kidding? (Score:4, Informative)

      by Elwood P Dowd ( 16933 ) <judgmentalist@gmail.com> on Thursday September 09, 2004 @04:34PM (#10205541) Journal
      Internet 2 uses it exclusively.

      Boy, are you wrong.

      WRONG.

      (Just that sentence, of course. The rest of your post is right.)

      Wrongity-wrong-wrong-wrong.

    • Artificial scarcity (Score:3, Interesting)

      by j1m+5n0w ( 749199 )

      The current network providers have little incentive to move to IPv6 because they make money through the artificial scarcity of IP addresses. They like the current situation because they have an advantage - new ISPs have trouble entering the market due to the lack of large contiguous IP blocks. When we start falling behind the rest of the world (since countries without enough IPs to go around have no reason to stick with IPv4), maybe they'll start switching to IPv6.

      NAT is a solution, and it may be useful

  • Short Sighted? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by hubs99 ( 318852 ) on Thursday September 09, 2004 @03:33PM (#10204620)
    The article instantly delcares that IPv4 was short sighted because it didn't allow for enough IP address but is IPv6 any better? The articles states that it will allow every person in the world to have close to 10 IPs but with the expanding products that carry addresses could this be short sighted as well? Think about the products that people are getting or are supposed to have within the next 20 years.

    Phone (Voip)
    Cell
    Computer (could be many)
    TV (could potentially need IP)
    Webcams

    then we have the possible use that people keep proclaiming will happen

    Fridges, and other appliances. This list could continue to grow and I could potentially see 100 being the closer value for many folks in many years. This being said of course not every person in the world is going to need lost of IP addy's since many people dont even need to use one now.

    But just think how fast the growth of Ip-Address need has grown in the past 30 years and use that to predict the growth for the next 30. As soon as there are available addresses people will use them. The only reason they aren't being used as liberally now is because they are not available.

    We might look back in 10 years and think how short sighted IPv6 was and why another 2 byes weren't just added to the protocol to make its growth laster for many, many,.... years.

    • Re:Short Sighted? (Score:5, Informative)

      by barcodez ( 580516 ) on Thursday September 09, 2004 @03:43PM (#10204783)
      The most obvious distinguishing feature of IPv6 is its use of much larger addresses. The size of an address in IPv6 is 128 bits, which is four times larger than an address in IPv4. A 32-bit address space allows for 2^32 or 4,294,967,296 possible addresses. A 128-bit address space allows for 2^128 or 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,45 6 (3.4 × 1038) possible addresses.
      The population of the earth is ~6 billion (US billion). So 56,713,727,820,156,410,577,229,101,238 each
    • unless you can come up with a way for every man woman and child on the planet to use 10^28th IP addresses in 10 years, we aint gonna run out of IPs under IPv6 anytime soon. 2^128=3.4E38 addresses.
    • There are a lot more than 10 addresses available for each person. What I think the author unclearly stated is that each person CAN have 10 IPs if needed, not that they were limited to 10 each.

      I don't remember the exact numbers, but I read in several places of an estimate of some thousands of IPs per square inch of the planet. It may not be accurate, but 10 per person is way on the low side.
    • No, your wrong. I predict you will only need 1 IP.

      It will be for your phone/computer/webcam/digital camera/mp3player/microwave/fridge/sex toy/stun gun/car/shower/beer/goatse combo device.

    • Re:Short Sighted? (Score:3, Informative)

      by Enigma_Man ( 756516 )
      Some quick google-based calculations for number of IP addresses for every square inch of the surface of the earth (including the ocean):

      (2^128) addresses / (7.9*10^17) square inches on earth = 4.3*10^20 addresses/in^2... That's a lot.

      But then again, they probably thought it was a lot to begin with :) Hindsight is 20/20.

      -Jesse
    • Yeah and what about the Y10K problem? It's being completely ignored!
  • Apart from the number of addresses, how signifigant are the changes in IPv6? Are our routers going to collapse soon under the weight of routing tables, and will v6 really fix that? Will subnetting be easier? The article mentions less (or no) reliance on DHCP; is this simply because there will be enough addresses to hand them out algorithmically (based on MAC?) or is there a replacement for dynamically requested IP addresses in v6?
  • I read Playboy writes and thought oh wow, is Miss October a Network Engineer..?

  • Very hard to read. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by winkydink ( 650484 ) * <sv.dude@gmail.com> on Thursday September 09, 2004 @03:36PM (#10204657) Homepage Journal
    Not the content, the page itself.

    Note to web page designers:
    Dark characters, light background, sans serif fonts. Trust me. People way smarter than you and mr have already figured this out.

  • Interesting math (Score:5, Interesting)

    by bojanb ( 162938 ) on Thursday September 09, 2004 @03:40PM (#10204713)
    since there will now be enough IPv6 addresses available for each person on the planet to have 10 of their very own.
    Heh, only if there is an "unexpected explosive expansion" of the human race. Last I checked, IPv6 address space is more than enough for a loooooooooot of addresses per capita.

    Oh, and I almost skipped the obligatory bashing - his first reference at the bottom of the article is Understanding IPv6 by Microsoft Press.

  • Guys got an error or two... (Score:5, Informative)

    by Ironsides ( 739422 ) on Thursday September 09, 2004 @03:42PM (#10204751) Homepage Journal
    there will no longer be a need for IP address conservation since there will now be enough IPv6 addresses available for each person on the planet to have 10 of their very own.

    Given that there are 128 bits for IPs in IPv6 this translates into 3.4*10^38 IP addresses. I think this comes out to roughly 5.6*10^28 IP addresses per person.

  • Only "10" IP addresses per person? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Vexler ( 127353 ) on Thursday September 09, 2004 @03:42PM (#10204753) Journal
    I don't think so. Even if he discounts the bits in the addressing architecture responsible for routing and local/global flags and just focuses on the global unicast address space, that still gives you 64 bits (see Section 2.5.4 of RFC3513).

    (2^64)/10000000000 = 1844674407.37 (approximately)

    And that's assuming ten billion total world population. It's not just ten addresses; everyone can network his/her own cold-fusion-powered TOASTER to the Internet and we wouldn't run out of IP's anytime soon.
    • For an amusing bit if trivia. The full 128-bit address space is remarkably close to a mol (6.02E23) per square meter of earth's surface.
      • You know, I came across something the other day that reminds me of this idea: That an NP-complete problem can have more number of possible solutions than the total number of atoms in the entire universe.

        The implication is that, even if we were to use quantum computers to store states, there are problems out there whose scope will outclass even our very method for attempting to find a solution.

        "P=NP?", by the way, is one of the seven millenium problems, along with the Poincare Conjecture most recently mak

  • you losers are still talking IPV6 ? get with it! (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 09, 2004 @03:42PM (#10204760)
    Come on guys, theres this thing called IPV8.

    get with the program!

    augh!

  • Whatever happened to IPv5? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by waynegoode ( 758645 ) * on Thursday September 09, 2004 @03:42PM (#10204767) Homepage
    If you ever wondered what happened to IPv5, check here [oreillynet.com].

    Now if we can just find out what happend to Netscape v5 [imswebtips.com].

  • IPv6 Multi-homing (Score:5, Interesting)

    by mplex ( 19482 ) on Thursday September 09, 2004 @03:43PM (#10204780)
    Last time I looked at IPv6, it seemed there was no way to multi-home hosts to two or more ISPs. Of course, this capability is essential for IPv6 to succeed. BGP has scaled pretty well thus far, but it is impossible to support peering on IPv6 like it is done on today's internet due to the size of routing tables and it's heirarchical nature. Anyone familiar with this problem or know if any progress has been made?

  • FrontPage (Score:2, Funny)

    by Tonik, the ( 748167 )
    Amusing... a article describing IPv6, an open standard, was created with Microsoft Frontpage 3.0. (Noticed this when changing the text colors from white-on-black to black-on-white.)

  • I am missing some detail (Score:3, Interesting)

    by wafflemonger ( 515122 ) on Thursday September 09, 2004 @03:47PM (#10204850)
    I was under the impression that a 128 bit addressing scheme was enough to directly address every molecule in the Universe with some bits left over. Why then is IPv6 limited to 60 thousand million addresses? I understand that some addresses cannot be used because of multicast addresses and some other things like that, but what other sort of limits reduces the available range down to such a (relatively) small number?
    • It's probably incorrect. I just calculated IP addresses per every atom in the earth, and there aren't enough in IPv6. I realize you said molecules and I said atoms, but... I'm only talking about the earth, and not the whole entire universe.

      That information is very easily calculated with a quick google search and google calculation.

      -Jesse

  • Doomsday... (Score:2, Insightful)

    by ARRRLovin ( 807926 )
    The internet is getting too big! The only way to save it is by using IPv6!

    I have a feeling this is going to be about as successful as getting the United States to convert to metric.

    "She'll do 20 hectares on one tank of kerosene!"

  • I just read Slashdot for the articles! (Score:3, Funny)

    by IntelliTubbie ( 29947 ) on Thursday September 09, 2004 @03:51PM (#10204897)
    Playboy writes

    Does that mean that everyone will pretend to read the article, but no one actually will? Come to think of it, maybe Slashdot should change its name to Playboy.

    Cheers,
    IT

  • Reserve Addresses? (Score:5, Funny)

    by fgb ( 62123 ) on Thursday September 09, 2004 @03:52PM (#10204919)
    Can you reserve addresses yet?

    I want dead:beef:dead:beef:dead:beef:dead:beef

    I had it all caps but the lame-ass lameness filter yelled at me ;-)

  • Distro-specific introduction (Score:4, Insightful)

    by jgarzik ( 11218 ) on Thursday September 09, 2004 @04:10PM (#10205161) Homepage
    Setting up IPv6 is actually quite easy these days.

    For Fedora Core users stuck without a direct IPv6 connection (read: most of the world), I wrote a quick IPv6 6to4 setup guide [linux.yyz.us].

    6to4 is "automatical tunnelling", which in layman's terms means you don't have to bother your ISP or a tunnel broker in order to set up IPv6 on your network. Most OS's these days (not only Linux but *BSD and Windows) fully support basic IPv6, including 6to4.

  • I would think the editors would have at least posted a warning in the pre-blurb.

  • So very wrong, it's not funny (Score:4, Insightful)

    by johne_ganz ( 750500 ) on Thursday September 09, 2004 @04:58PM (#10205871)
    Another positive outcome of IPv6 will be better internet routing using QoS, Quality of Service, which routes packets based on priority.

    What? There is nothing in IPv6 about this. You can do this right now, today, with IPv4 by having a flexible queueing methodology and flexible packet pattern matching systems. Violla. Any packet destined to network 1.2.0.0/16 that is TCP and port 80 no gets dumped in the high priority queue.

    QoS is also the perfect snake oil. In a practical sense, QoS only "kicks in" when there's contention, when there's more data that needs to squeeze in to the pipe than can fit. QoS makes the choice of which packet gets to go over all the other packets waiting to go.

    In other words, the only time QoS is of any good is when you are on a over subscribed, saturated network, where there isn't enough bandwidth available to meet demand. In simple terms, the network is broken, and QoS just helps pick who gets screwed the least.

    Lastly, routing will be simplified because the IPv6 information header on each packet is far more flexible and can contain more detailed information than an IPv4 header thus allowing for faster routing of data across a network or the internet. Currently, most routers need to maintain as many as 48,000 different routes in their routing tables just to effectively route data that passes through them. IPv6 reduces this number by at least 75%.

    This, too, is just flat out wrong. The only way this works is if you have a "clean slate" and parcel out IP addresses in a country/provider hierarchal fashion. Want to move providers? You get new IP's, out of their block. Want to multi home? Well, that kinda blows the efficiency right out of the water because now your network is no longer contained within the providers supernet, you have to announce your individual network both via your provider and where ever else you're peered. Therefore, you just added networks to the global routing tables.

    Now, quick show of hands... how many of you want to run your systems off a single homed, single provider only network? And please, none of this god awful "let the router pick which source IP to use!" crap.

    Also, if you're worried about IPv6 requiring you to change all of your software, learn new protocols, new methods of connecting, new ways of sending and receiving data or anything like that, fear not. The only thing really changing with IPv6 over what was in IPv4 is that you now have a larger address space which allows for more network addressable IP addresses, a more flexible header and packet system, and faster routing.

    Yea, you don't have to change a thing. Not any of your software, or nothin'. Of course, you do need a whole new IP stack to talk IPv6, but that's pretty minor right? Windows folks can make this change by simply cracking open their registries and changing the IP Version key from 4 to 6. Ta da!

    Faster routing? How's that? Does it make sense to anyone that looking up a 128 bit address is going to be faster than looking up a 32 bit address? There's more to look up.

    Furthermore, all routers worth their salt use hardware accelerated forwarding engines these days. Modern BiCAM's or (nearly always) TCAM's can do single cycle lookup of an address out of a potential 512K entries. It doesn't matter how many entries there are, it can always do find the correct match in a single cycle. And 512K entries is a bit more than a default free routing table (~140K entries) that's common today, so there's no worries there.

    The catch is, most of these hardware lookup engines are hard wired for IPv4, and can't easily be extended to IPv6, which means the packets become exception packets and need to be dealt with by the CPU. The CPU lookups are orders of magnitude slower than the hardware lookups. This means that performance for IPv6 goes right through the floor for most routers. Newer routers/blades are starting to come with IPv6 hardware accelerated, but there's an awful lot of infrastructure out there that has no IPv6 hardware acceleration.

    Therefore, for most people, IPv6 will initially result in a signfigicant performance drop in terms of packets per second over IPv4.

  • Doesn't every device on the net already have a unique (unless customized otherwise) address? Can't we use MAC addresses?

    • Re:what's all the hubbub, bub? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by andfarm ( 534655 ) on Thursday September 09, 2004 @05:38PM (#10206345)
      MAC addresses aren't guaranteed to be unique, and they're useless for routing. You can look at the IP address on a packet - whether IPv4 or v6 - and quickly tell where it should go next. You can't do the same with MAC addresses, though: routers would have to keep a table of every single MAC address on the Net (!!) to route packets properly.

  • Little extra wrinkle (Score:3, Interesting)

    by riptalon ( 595997 ) on Thursday September 09, 2004 @05:50PM (#10206472)

    There is one small thing that the the article leaves out; where the 64-bit "Interface ID" that is the second half of the address will come from. It isn't going to be some essentially random number assigned to that computer as it is for IPv4 (e.g *.001, *.027, *.145). The first 64 bits of the IPv6 address is routing information to get you to the right subnet, like the first 24 bits in IPv4 (e.g. 145.67.56.*). But unlike IPv4, that has only 8 bits left to identify the particular machine on the subnet, IPv6 has 64 bits available.

    This vastly larger space doesn't just allow for larger subnets, it is so big that it allows the values to unique, not just on the subnet but globally. So how are these unique values to be chosen? From the unique IDs embedded in the NIC hardware of course (i.e. your ethernet cards MAC address or the EUI-64 standard that will eventually replace it). So the two halves of the IPv6 address will contain routing information (where you are) and a unique ID (irespective of where you are).

    As wireless becomes more unbiquitous in the future, using IPv4 addresses to track people will get more difficult. IPv6 provides the solution. As someone connects with a wireless device at different locations only the first 64 bits of routing information will change, the second 64 bits, the unique ID will stay the same. Who you are (or at least what NIC you are using) and where you are is plastered one every IPv6 packet you send.

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