15 ms·

There is no Plan B: why the IPv4-to-IPv6 transition will be ugly

188 points by soundsop 16y ago

dennisgorelik 16y ago
It looks like the article ignores important fact that IP4 address is used to determine location and whether the sender is spammer or not. When IP addresses are easily available, it would be harder to maintain such locations and spam databases. It looks to me that IPv6 is a waste of time and would eventually be replaced by some other technology.
- Groxx 16y ago
  Like? And when? And on what hardware? That address space issue still looms - putting it off another 20 years won't help anything. IPv6 stuff is available now, the problem is in using two different formats - introducing a new format is unlikely to solve that issue.
- narrator 16y ago
  Naah.. The government will just require your unique citizen identifier in the bottom 64 bits. You won't be able to sign up for an ISP or a cell phone or any other connected device without it. Why do you think they made the address space so absurdly huge?
  - derefr 16y ago
    Who is this "the government?" In fact, I heard somewhere that the government of any arbitrary spammer is just as likely as not to be a whole different government!
    - Groxx 16y ago
      Clearly the narrator is referring to that meta-governing-body, The Government. You know, the one all the conspiracy theorists never see, because it's OMG REAL, and therefore not a conspiracy. Narrators, however, have outside knowledge of the system they narrate, so they would be in a position to know of such a system.
      - narrator 16y ago
        Ok, it's a paranoid theory for now but I couldn't think of any other possible reason for such a large address space besides being permanent unique identifcation of clients, like a mac address. The bandwidth wasted on sending those addresses around multiplied by every packet on the internet seems ridiculously wastefull otherwise. For instance, there will probably never be 2^128 packets created and sent on the internet between now and the heat death of the universe.
        Groxx 16y ago
        Wasn't meaning to shoot down the paranoia, just having fun with / at your username, as I saw the potential for fun :) It's certainly excessive, but more layers = more efficient routing, and I'd assume they don't want to go through all this again in a mere 1000 years when we're populating 5 planets, everyone has 100+ network connected devices, and data centers have billions. And everyone tweets.
        narrator 16y ago
        You don't understand how large 2^128 is do you? Let's quit all this handwavy crap about how that's a nice big number and look at how absurdly big it is. The number of seconds since the universe started is 13.75 billion * 86400 * 365 = 4.3 x 10 ^ 17 seconds. U.S Internet traffic was 18 exabytes (1 exabyte=10^18 bytes) a year, so let's just say that that we are sending 18 exabytes a second since the beginning of the universe and we are counting each byte. Yes, each set of 8 1s and 0s. How many is that? 4.3 x 10 ^17 * 18 * 10^18 = 7.74 * 10 ^36. 2^128= 3.4 + 10 ^ 38 / (7.74 * 10^36 ) =~ 43. So you could have a different ip address for every byte sent over the Internet, assuming the traffic for the whole year was sent over the course of 1 second for every second in 43 times the current age of the universe.
        Groxx 16y ago
        I understand it perfectly well, yes. I also understand that people like to buy ranges of IP addresses. This much space makes it not only easy, they can sell large ranges nearly indefinitely. Sell + indefinitely = yes, from their viewpoint.
- garyrichardson 16y ago
  Blacklisting IP's is typically based on the behavior of the address. More importantly, networks tend to be listed if a certain percentage of addresses on it send spam, act like a bot, etc. Location databases are based on the owner of the netblock. There are still networks in in IPv6. Typically, with IPv6, MAC addresses take up the right 48 bits of the 128 bit IPv6 address. other 90 bits are used for subnetting/routing. The new spam and location databases will focus on these 90 bits, just like location databases usually focus on the /24.
- jwegan 16y ago
  I find it hard to believe that the transition from IPv4 to IPv6 which has been anticipated for nearly two decades and is supported by all major hardware and software vendors (albeit with the issues mentioned in the article) will simply be discarded because software engineers will have to think a bit more carefully than just banning people based on IP (which is already a bad way to detect spammers since it is very common for many people to share the same IP if they are behind a NAT). Furthermore, for location it would be no harder than IPv4 since location databases, just like routing rely on prefixing which doesn't go away with IPv6. Also because the IPv6 address space is so big, there are event proposals to allocate blocks of the address space to each country and then the country can further distribute its block among all the various cities/regions of the country which would greatly simplify determining location based on IP.
Groxx 16y ago
I still fail to see an issue in any of this if the rollout moves from backbone-to-users, and not the other way around. Which is the only order which makes much sense anyway - if the backbones can't route your packet, what's the point in speaking that language? ISP-level NATs don't make sense, except in connecting external-IPv6 to internal-IPv4, in which case: so? Only serve up the IPv4 connections which currently exist, creating no new ones and dynamically mapping no ports, and pass through all IPv6. And if I recall correctly, IPv4 addresses are reserved in a range of IPv6 addresses already, so translating is a non-issue if the in-between is all IPv6. Any attempt to access IPv6-only addresses from IPv4 get fake IPv4 addresses, probably as some hashed value so repeat connections yield the same result. External-IPv4 to internal-IPv6: yeah, full of issues. Who gets port 80 once you start sharing external IP addresses? SSL ports? How about all those port-specific email servers? But not the reverse. I could be missing something obvious, though. IANAIETF expert by any stretch of the imagination. Anyone care to correct me? (edited for a bit more, and less block-of-text-iness)
- btilly 16y ago
  There is sort of IPV4 in IPV6. It is there. It is not universally supported. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv6#IPv4-mapped_IPv6_addresses http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv6#IPv4-mapped_IPv6_addresses for more.
- seanlinmt 16y ago
  Yes, it does depend on whether your upstream provider, i.e. ISP supports IPv6. DNS root servers supports IPv6 and most domain name services should support IPv6 by now. There is no NAT in IPv6. The address that you get should be globally routable, Unless of course your ISP have any IP filters in place. In the end it will depend on how your ISP allocates IP addresses to you. Initially, the main issue was non-IPv6 capable CPE devices like your cheapo ADSL modem. The way around this was via Teredo tunneling, tunneling on IPv6 packets within IPv4 UDP packets. Windows Vista and above supports IPv6 pretty well out of the box including Teredo tunnelling out of the box. Most BSD flavours are alright via the KAME project... not too sure about Darwin though. Anyway, it's been awhile since I've worked in the IPv6 area so god knows what else they've come up with.
- 16y ago
stretchwithme 16y ago
one thing that can be done when the transition is made. we could make an initial switch of all IPv6-capable machines for a short initial period that would reveal all machines not capable, then switch back to IPv4 for enough time to get those now very aware of their problem. We could do that for several weekends prior to the real switch. Such an approach would require a lot of software to be changed, to be sure. But it might be worth it.
- viraptor 16y ago
  Yup - that's exactly what customers will allow you to do. Especially if you're running ISP / ITSP, your customers will be glad you disconnected most of their devices while testing this new thing they know nothing about and care about even less.
ck2 16y ago
The class E block of IPv4 (240.0.0.0/4) has 268 million addresses available but no existing version of Windows will see/talk to them. So just sue Microsoft to make a patch available since they obviously aren't going to fix that on their own and you bought IPv4 a few more years.
- mseebach 16y ago
  61 million smartphones sold in Q2. Your solution will last little longer than a year, assuming perfect allocation of that block.
  - ck2 16y ago
    Can we NAT verizon and at&t? lol
    - loup-vaillant 16y ago
      They're not, but they do. At least here in France, the main carriers put every single smart-phone under a NAT router. While IP hasn't ran out yet. They don't want their customers to run servers on their smart-phones.
- koenigdavidmj 16y ago
  People who do multicast may not be too happy.
cletus 16y ago
One thing that doesn't make sense to me is that people are comparing the number of internet-connected devices to the size of the IPv4 address space, implying each device needs its own IPv4 address. This is obviously not the case. NAT (Network Address Translation) techniques can hide thousands of devices behind one IP address. In fact, for security reasons, it's advisable to not have every device directly on the internet. I have an ADSL modem/router at home with NAT, which makes substandard firewall solutions as what is provided by Windows pretty much unnecessary. So perhaps we simply need to reclaim large blocks (particularly those universities and companies that have large A blocks of ~16 million addresses) and save IP addresses for each machine for ISPs, servers and those that actually need them. Of course that's hard to mandate but like many things you can solve it with market forces: charge people who have more than, say, 128 IP addresses on a scale such that the most economic thing to do is transition away from that and give up their addresses.
- tjpick 16y ago
  coming back after the fact and saying "I know you got a sweet deal on those IP addresses when they were going cheap but we've run out and want them back so we're going to charge you extra" isn't really going to fly. You could argue the same case with domain squatters, or real estate, but it just can't work that way. You could buy them back -- at a premium of course.
  - bostonvaulter2 16y ago
    You could hypothetically charge a small yearly fee for each IP Address owned. Of course there would be lots of financial hurdles with this approach.
    - wmf 16y ago
      ARIN already charges fees for IP addresses; I suppose they take 'em back if you don't pay. https://www.arin.net/fees/fee_schedule.html https://www.arin.net/fees/fee_schedule.html Note that legacy holders don't pay fees on their massive /8s.
- 16y ago
ThomPete 16y ago
It might be ugly but cellphones around the world rejoice. Your battery is going to love you for it.
- viraptor 16y ago
  Could you explain what you mean? What do cellphones have to do with this?
  - ThomPete 16y ago
    When your cellphone get a static IP instead of a dynamic one your cellphone should be able to save up to 50% energy. http://www.usipv6.com/what_is_ipv6.php http://www.usipv6.com/what_is_ipv6.php "IPv6 is compatible with 3G wireless (near) broadband and has other features that support greater mobility. There will be two billion mobile phones by 2006 and (at least) two addresses are required per mobile phone, so just enabling every mobile phone will require more IP addresses than are left with IPv4. Static addresses can also double battery life by not wasting power by checking whether a call is completed so the carrier can grab back the dynamic IP address, which wastes a great deal of power."
    - gxti 16y ago
      That seems quite optimistic. Do you have a source from someone who knows something about electronics engineering instead of networking?
      - ThomPete 16y ago
        I heard a Nokia engineer talk about it in some Podcast. Let me see if I can dig it up. Edit: He (the Nokia engineer didn't talk about the 50%, that's only that article) only talked about better battery life in general. Whether the 50% is true I only have that article to point to.
    - viraptor 16y ago
      I'll have to call [citation needed] on "double battery life". I have 3 jabber accounts with keepalives, skype with it's own keepalives, sip with reregistration and pinging, additional status messages are transmitted every couple of seconds on all of them. If I turn all of them off, my battery life does not increase 2 times. ~5-10% the last time I checked. I really doubt disabling the dhcp-equivalent on 3G can improve the battery life 2 times.
acqq 16y ago
Anybody knows how the 128 bits in the addresses are really going to be allocated? If everybody gets "lower 64-bit for a subnet," and every device simply considers that it should allow that the subnet is whatever is a slave of it, we end up using only the upper part, and then if you again give big chunks of upper 64 bits to different entities like it happened with IPv4, there's still real chance that even if the space is big it remains inefficient, especially if upper 64 bits are separated to encode some special assumptions about routing or whatever. Is there any text about this whole subject, which just doesn't brag that 128 bits is "a lot?"
- storborg 16y ago
  Those are some pretty big assumptions. But, even if only 64 bits were used, that's still enough space for every human on earth to have 2.75 billion IPv6 addresses.
  - acqq 16y ago
    Only if there are no distribution rules in upper 64 bits, which is not going to happen. That's why I'd like to know the planned allocation process. Do you know anything about it? I posted my question to get exactly that info.
    - magamiako 16y ago
      As the wikipedia article states, and as the IANA assignments are coming through--you, as your personal self, gets a /48 block. Or rather, your "premises" gets a /48 block. If you're a small business owner with 10 computers, you get a /48 block. If you're a home user, you get a /48 block. If you're a large enterprise business, you get a /48 block. It's a rather significant waste of addressing and I really wish they had moved it over a few blocks, but that's the current plan. That said, you have to figure. Right now, for internet alone, we're using only 1/8th the space of the IPv6 address space. The plans are 2000::/3. Which essentially means 2000:: through 3FFF::. that's a rather ridiculous amount of hosts. It comes out to 2^125 hosts. 4.25352959 × 10^37 hosts on the internet. It's unfathomably large. So it doesn't really matter if huge chunks are wasted. You won't ever really use all of it anyway. I agree that the IPv6 space is ridiculously large, but that's kind of the point. They realized that the internet infrastructure will only continue to grow--and they want to, at all costs, avoid any problem with hitting the limit of addressing at any point in the future. The larger it grows, the more of a problem it will be to change it later on.
signa11 16y ago
djb's description here: http://cr.yp.to/djbdns/ipv6mess.html http://cr.yp.to/djbdns/ipv6mess.html is pretty good too...
- caf 16y ago
  Aye. djb is pretty opinionated, but in this case he is spot on.
  - trezor 16y ago
    I disagree. His main objection seems to be thatfor IPv6 to work, administrators would (shock) have to administer IPv6. As he says: They would 1. have to acquire IPv6 address-space and 2. they will have to add it to their DNS. That's it. Once that is done, 99% of things out there just work. If you run Windows and Active Directory, all you have to do is acquire address space, as AD does DNS for you automagically. If we can't expect administrators to put in this minimum of effort to make the internet work in the future, but instead expect them to be able to set up huge layered NAT infrastructures with all the extra effort and problems that leads to, something is horribly, horribly wrong. Really. IPv6 opponents seems to live under the illusion that IPv6 will create more work, which in itself is true, but they ignore the extra work required to make IPv4 work at all. Work at all today that is. It's not going to get better in the future.
    - caf 16y ago
      I believe his objection is that, being realistic about these things, administrators won't bother to seperately administer IPv6, when it doesn't confer any advantage to the first movers. It's not about what should happen, it's about what will, taking into account the reality of human behaviour. And even if 95% of sites out there did enable IPv6, then everyone will still want IPv4 addresses so that they can still reach that last 1-in-20 - the transition simply can't happen until all existing sites are reachable over v6. I don't think he's an "IPv6 opponent", I think he just makes a good case that there isn't a workable transition plan.
CrLf 16y ago
The real problem with IPv6 is that it focuses too much on the technical issues and mostly ignores the human issues. This is why it hasn't gained significant traction and, IMHO, won't even when the IANA runs out of unallocated IPv4 blocks. There are a few main issues with IPv4: 1. Everybody wants to have a public IP address, and that is making the available IP addresses run out really fast; 2. There are huge chunks of allocated addresses that are in fact unused. And there are also a number of public addressable /8's being used for internal networks for no good reason; 3. Splitting up wasted /8's in (geographically disperse) small chunks isn't feasible because routing tables would get huge. No. 1 is easy to solve: not everybody needs a public IP address, no matter what people say. Mobile phones can survive just fine with private addressing behind a NAT. Public addresses for mobile users could be handed out on a case-by-case basis, for an additional fee. No. 2 will come into play once we run out of address space. Scarcity will trigger a market for IPv4 addresses, and as any scarce resource, its use will be rationalized and made more efficient. No. 3 is the most tricky. But that's where IPv6 really appears as the problem solver. Internet backbones will have a different structure than the IPv4 addressing implies, and that structure will be made with IPv6. IPv4 will be tunneled over IPv6 networks with its own structure. In fact, this has been done for a long while inside the ISP's networks using MPLS (IP packets enter the ISP network and are then routed using MPLS until they exit into another ISP/carrier's network). Those multiple MPLS domains will become a single IPv6 domain. The structure of the Internet will change when IPv4 addresses become scarce, that's for sure, but I seriously doubt IPv6 will gain acceptance at the network endpoints. There is just too much legacy for that to happen in the next 30 years at least. I belive in scarcity dynamics, so I'm not too worried. Also I also belive NAT to be a good solution for private networks and don't agree with the view that NAT is evil.
- BerislavLopac 16y ago
  1. "not everybody needs a public IP address": sure, and there is no need for more than 6 computers on the entire world, ever. In my opinion, stalling the transition hurts innovation; while it's true that as the things are at present public addresses are not an imperative, new technologies like P2P, which would greatly benefit from public addresses, open a whole new realm of possibilities. 2. Again correct, assuming that there is no cheaper alternative to the "addresses market". But it exists, and is (mostly) free. Once the providers realize that it's less expensive (longterm) to switch to IPv6 than to keep buying new addresses, they'll do it, even such a solution might prolong things even more. In general, most of "solutions" to the IPv4 crisis represent a sizable effort, which will only increase as the addresses become more scarce; and the sum of it will be much larger than the effort of simply switching to v6. We'll see how it will turn out though.
mgkimsal 16y ago
Couple random points: I just bought a new consumer router last year (actually, come to think of it, 2). Neither have current support in the admin screens for IPv6 - it's the standard 4 box dotted quad input only. Yes, a firmware upgrade can solve this, but this was 2009 at the time - how much more time do hardware vendors need to put this in consumer products, where we'll see arguably the most pain (in terms of hand-holding service requirements)? Also, relating to screens, a huge number (large majority?) of software is coded specifically to the dotted-quad format. I think we'd have seen more adoption if the plan we're migrating to had simply added a couple more dots to it. Easier for people to think about at the end, and would have given us a moderately larger pool base, easier way of thinking about new address spaces (visually, I mean). 64.27.78.45.134.240 where you tell people that the first two (or last two) now correspond to new addresses, and 'old' addressed simply have two leading 0s, would have made transition easier to swallow (IMHO). 2001:0f68:0000:0000:0000:0000:1986:69af, in comparison, even if shortened down, looks pretty alien. Adding two dotted quads would have given us 65k x 4 billion addresses. Yes, it's not IPv6-sized, I know. But in terms of the 'let's measure everything by how many IPs each person on the planet can have!' it would have been sufficient for a while - I think most people would be fine with fewer than 20k addresses each. I know this is wholly naive of me, and real hackers everywhere can do this stuff in their sleep. However, 'real hackers' aren't going to be dealing with the majority of this transition - it's going to be average joes trying to help their family get back on the internet over the phone after they mistype something on their new DLINK-950v6 router from Best Buy. We're well past the phase where we can back out, or I think even consider alternatives, but the impact to existing software screens is not to be underestimated. IPv6 may turn out to be the real Y2k.
- BrandonM 16y ago
  > how much more time do hardware vendors need to put this in consumer products, where we'll see arguably the most pain (in terms of hand-holding service requirements)? Under IPv6, won't customers just need a hub or a switch? Every IPv6-aware device in the home will just request a unique address directly from the ISP, completely eliminating the need for home routers. Of course, devices still needing IPv4 would need some other solution. Of course, that doesn't come without a tradeoff (as mentioned in the submission). Those IPv6 devices will need to be aware that they are connected to the Internet at large, and security will need to be addressed accordingly.
tptacek 16y ago
Consider carefully: to really deploy IPv6, we'll need to change most of our networking software (clients and servers) to handle v6 addresses. This would be hard enough if the v6 migration was a one-liner. But it isn't. Beyond the fact that you have to handle both sockaddr_in and sockaddr_in6, note that v4 addresses are scalar values for C programs. C does not have a scalar 128 bit type. Our v6 future is NAT'd to the horizon. If that's the case, what's the major win for v6 to this generation? The notion that we're imminently going to run out of v4 addresses is at least somewhat artificial, since we run fiat allocation schemes right now and could migrate to a market-based allocation to replace it. There are companies addressing desktop machines with routable /16 components because they don't believe in NAT; there are companies grandfathered in to /8(!) allocations. A lot of this waste might stop if people had to pay for it.
- loup-vaillant 16y ago
  What you are proposing is likely to trigger (or at least prolong) a dark age of the internet. And I'm not exaggerating the slightest. If people have to pay for IP addresses, then the internet will be divided in two: those who can pay, and those who can't run a server. And I predict that the crushing majority of people who use the internet will be of the second category. This would obviously be a catastrophe for freedom of speech and even privacy. The major win for v6 is enormous: an IP for everyone, and the possibility for a server at every home, which will at last give us the decentralized internet we should have had in the first place.
  - tptacek 16y ago
    If it costs $5/yr for a single IP address, I'm not too concerned about the cost. Meanwhile, most of the applications YC-types build don't necessarily need routable IP addresses. In a better world, most of our content would be delivered via overlay networks that abstract away that detail anyways. In the immediacy, what matters is the DNS. We are in a dark age of the Internet, and it's our own doing. We've tethered ourselves to an archaic protocol that already indentures us to massive telco and cable operators, and would even if we had portable /32's assigned directly and personally from ARIN. I don't see why we should be focusing all our engineering efforts on this one technological detail, tethering us forever to the idea that a license to speak on the Internet entails an IP address. There's 15+ years of research behind better networking topologies that care no more about IP addresses than a home router cares about Ethernet MAC addresses. Let's go that direction. It's easier, and probably better.
SanjayUttam 16y ago
There is clearly a debate going on in this thread regarding whether or not we are running out of address space/whether or not we need truly globally routeable IPs, etc. Assuming that we do need to go the IPv6 route, for a second... I wouldn't really expect any businesses to go the way of IPv6 unless there was some kind of 1) Financial benefit, or 2) A law that required them to do so. Otherwise, there is really no reason to spend any time/money on it (Even if it is negligible). I can't find the source, but I believe at one point (maybe still) the Japanese govt. was providing cash incentives (tax benefits, etc.) for businesses to go the IPv6 route.
ay 16y ago
I am one of the authors of a draft that describes how to make the transition, at least for the "client" apps (like HTTP), more straightforward: http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-wing-http-new-tech http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-wing-http-new-tech Also, for the rogue RAs, there is a solution too: http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-v6ops-ra-guard http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-v6ops-ra-guard (currently shipping in some products already). For security, there are better approaches that do not compromise the applications transparency as much as the filters do: http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-vyncke-advanced-ipv6-security http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-vyncke-advanced-ipv6-securi... To summarize, knowing Iljitch personally, I hoped for a more sober article. v4->v6 transition is not going to be easy, sure. But the article does come through as having a slightly hysteric tone, which is unfortunate. As for "no customers" stance that I hear every now and then: Just today I had a chat with a large-ish service provider. They have quite a lot of enterprise customers for IPv6 today. XS4ALL provides IPv6 in .nl today. free.fr has been doing it for years already. Finally, to end on a cheerful note - some folks have found this video funny, hopefully you might as well: http://www.xtranormal.com/watch/7011357/ http://www.xtranormal.com/watch/7011357/ - though I do not claim to have the best sense of humor.
- tptacek 16y ago
  What's the value proposition of an IPv6 address to any of (a) my mom, (b) a YC web app founder, or (c) a Fortune 500 company in the industry standard best-practices configuration of private non-routable addresses for internal hosts sitting behind a series of firewalls and proxies set up for policy reasons? A customer use case for any one of these scenarios would be enlightening.
  - ay 16y ago
    (a) - When she would have to choose whether to pay $10 or $30 per month for the facebook. (b) - Experience, when down the road a year or two from now it will mean some real eyeballs. If you do not care about serving to mobile users, no need to bother. Maybe there are startups that are not just about webapps. (c) - they already have IPv6. On Vista and Windows7. Just that it travels over Teredo. Reason: visibility into the end-station traffic. I am not trying to convince you that IPv6 is the panacea. If you show me the compelling argument towards the standard p2p substrate that would not abuse the links between the ISPs too much, is standardized, has implementations in all the major OSes as part of standard distribution with similar API - or freely available in the source code form with the BSD or MIT license - I'd be happy to see it. Oh yes - and you can show the business cases for it for the above three participants, too, if you like. Oh, and of course it has to traverse multiple layers of NATs too. I'd seriously use it in some of the pet projects.
m104 16y ago
No plan B? Hah! Let's face it already: there will be no IPv6 transition. Eight years ago, I was in the "more effort needed" school of thought about IPv6. I figured we'd slowly update our programs and toolkits and libraries and reference material and college textbooks and switches, etc., and by 2005 it'd be about the right time to switch over. It will be painful, I thought, but necessary and ultimately a very good thing. So I waited and watched, much as I'm sure many of the HN readers have been doing. I figured that those people who are smarter and more connected than me would form the leadership of the IPv6 migration and show the rest of us the way to 128-bit Internet addressing bliss. Realistically, though, we're no closer to a workable migration to IPv6 today then we were in 2002. Since then, we've managed to switch from analog to digital TV (at least in the US), migrate most software from ISO-8859-1 to some flavor of Unicode, settle the Blueray/HD-DVD format war, increment the USB protocol twice, formalize HTML into HTML 4.0 and XHTML and HTML 5, and virtualize or emulate every major operating system onto every major hardware platform. But nothing of any substance has happened on the IPv6 front. The reasons for the lack of progress have been clearly laid out by others, but the unspoken sad reality is that we're wasting our time with IPv6. Even to say "IPv6 migration" implies that it will happen and thus IPv6 is the only solution to IPv4's woes. We're torturing ourselves with IPv6 by going on like this and it's not bringing us any closer to a solution! At this point, there's no reason not to start looking for workable extensions to IPv4 (and TCP/IP in general) to address the issues we're having. I'd bet that a small group of dedicated engineers could come up with an compatible extension to IPv4 (that expands the address space) and could develop a workable migration strategy, example code, socket library modifications, and a compatible version of Ubuntu all within a year. Imagine the excitement if IPv6 could be sent to the circular file and a clear alternative was not only proposed, but downloadable. So, in short, that's my solution: cast off IPv6 as the death march project that it is and get excited about a minimum viable product (see what I did there?) alternative to IPv4. Oh, and since this is HN: I'm sure that there's just no way to make money from an extension to IPv4. No consumer going to need a converter box, to sit between their modem and LAN, right? I mean, the government would have to offer rebates. Madness! No businesses are going to need consulting services or contracted coding work. Nope. It certainly won't be like Y2K, but even it it was I'm sure no one made any money from that transition...
- 16y ago
ankimal 16y ago
IPv6 always reminds me of this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_y36fG2Oba0 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_y36fG2Oba0
jrockway 16y ago
As far as I can tell, IPv6 is already here. My home network has IPv6, and all my servers have IPv6. Doing this amounted to one line of config on the servers, two lines of config on my router (one to tell it the ipv6 address, one to start rtadvd), and no configuration on my workstations. And, I have better IPv6 connectivity from home than IPv4. Traceroute to Google: $ traceroute google.com traceroute to google.com (209.85.225.104), 30 hops max, 60 byte packets 1 blinky.internal (10.0.0.2) 0.267 ms 0.249 ms 0.230 ms 2 dsl253-036-001.chi1.dsl.speakeasy.net (66.253.36.1) 15.046 ms 19.018 ms 23.002 ms 3 220.ge-0-1-0.cr2.chi1.speakeasy.net (69.17.83.153) 16.991 ms 20.965 ms 24.950 ms 4 core1-2-2-0.ord.net.google.com (206.223.119.21) 26.932 ms 28.911 ms 30.893 ms 5 72.14.236.178 (72.14.236.178) 32.875 ms 72.14.236.176 (72.14.236.176) 87.863 ms 72.14.236.178 (72.14.236.178) 34.822 ms 6 209.85.241.22 (209.85.241.22) 37.802 ms 72.14.232.141 (72.14.232.141) 39.334 ms 41.312 ms 7 209.85.241.35 (209.85.241.35) 43.294 ms 209.85.241.29 (209.85.241.29) 23.635 ms 23.689 ms 8 66.249.95.138 (66.249.95.138) 27.670 ms 72.14.239.18 (72.14.239.18) 29.652 ms 209.85.248.102 (209.85.248.102) 31.626 ms 9 iy-in-f104.1e100.net (209.85.225.104) 33.608 ms 35.591 ms 37.573 ms Traceroute6 to IPv6 Google: $ traceroute6 ipv6.google.com traceroute to ipv6.google.com (2001:4860:b007::68), 30 hops max, 80 byte packets 1 blinky.jrock.us (2001:470:1f11:488::1) 0.273 ms 0.246 ms 0.228 ms 2 jrockway-1.tunnel.tserv9.chi1.ipv6.he.net (2001:470:1f10:488::1) 17.464 ms 19.492 ms 21.437 ms 3 gige-g3-4.core1.chi1.ipv6.he.net (2001:470:0:6e::1) 31.410 ms 33.398 ms 35.383 ms 4 * * * 5 2001:4860::1:0:3f7 (2001:4860::1:0:3f7) 29.284 ms 2001:4860::1:0:92e (2001:4860::1:0:92e) 37.278 ms 2001:4860::1:0:3f7 (2001:4860::1:0:3f7) 39.263 ms 6 2001:4860::1:0:1d1 (2001:4860::1:0:1d1) 46.248 ms 2001:4860::1:0:2776 (2001:4860::1:0:2776) 47.653 ms 49.593 ms 7 2001:4860::38 (2001:4860::38) 51.579 ms 36.400 ms 36.944 ms 8 2001:4860:0:1::f (2001:4860:0:1::f) 35.849 ms 2001:4860:0:1::d (2001:4860:0:1::d) 33.996 ms 33.369 ms 9 iy-in-x68.1e100.net (2001:4860:b007::68) 27.974 ms 31.954 ms 31.951 ms Same number of hops, but less latency!
- ay 16y ago
  Nice to see the specific data. Another data point: last year at FOSDEM we had more than just a couple of v6-connected hosts, here're some stats I kept for fun: http://stdio.be/onsite.fosdem.net/ http://stdio.be/onsite.fosdem.net/ Needless to say, noone ran after the conference participants to upgrade the software on their devices.
jodrellblank 16y ago
Countdown of IPv4 address allocation: http://twitter.com/ipv4countdown http://twitter.com/ipv4countdown
runjake 16y ago
I'm not discounting the article's assertions, but we're doing fine with a ~7,000 node IPv4/IPv6 network. Each node is running a reasonably modern client OS (80/20 Mac OS X/Windows 7, mostly). Most of our servers are Windows Server 2008 and some 2003. We do have several Linux servers, as well. Pretty much all the service they run seamlessly translate to IPv6 (Exchange, IIS, SMB, AFP, Apache [and its modules]) Each node and server get an IPv4 address and an IPv6 address. Mac OS X and Windows prefer IPv6 transport over IPv4 and most users have no clue when they go to Google, they're doing so over IPv6. nearly all of our internal web, email, and file sharing traffic is over IPv6. Nobody knows any different. There has been small, interesting issues, but we're able to resolve them pretty quickly and haven't run into anything even marginally major. From the looks of things, the transition will be like the fader control on an audio mixer. Nodes will have dual stacks, and IPv4 will fade out gradually and IPv6 will, at the same time, fade in gradually, and nobody will be the wiser (other than the poor network programmers who have to get their network code IPv6 ready, which frankly, they should've begun years ago). Implementing a large-ish scale IPv6 network (dual stacked, of course) has been relatively pain-free (in our experience).
- tptacek 16y ago
  I think the subtext of this article is that schemes like this appear to work because you're really relying on IPv4 for guaranteed network access; the true migration to IPv6 (the "magic moment" as DJB would call it) hasn't happened until people can feasibly not depend on IPv4 for a production network. If everyone has to be dual-stacked, then we're committed indefinitely to making IPv4 workable. Which is fine! But it rather lessens the urgency of converting people to IPv6.
  - runjake 16y ago
    But are we really relying on IPv4 when at least 90% of our network traffic has seamlessly transitioned to IPv6? It's almost funny to say this, but it seems like IPv4 is already legacy for us. Sure, some external websites haven't yet converted to IPv6, so the stack falls back to IPv4, but for the most part (and 90% is probably a very conservative estimate) IPv6 is king across the WAN. The downside to IPv6 is that it's a steep learning curve, and virtually nobody else in the org is even marginally familiar with it. If you're familiar with bit math, IPv6 is a bit easier, but then you get into routing and DHCPv6 which tend to differ significantly in some areas from their v4 counterparts. Also, I'm finding that certain vendors' (cough Cisco) IPv6 implementations aren't nearly as tight as they claim. It wasn't until July 2010 that Cisco really implemented DHCPv6 in a usable manner in IOS. Now if only Apple iOS devices supported IPv6 ;)
peterwwillis 16y ago
I could just be misinformed/sleepy, but why can't we all just multihome? Upgrade or replace (tech refresh, anyone?) all gear which doesn't natively support v6 and start running both networks at the same time. You hardly need to support anything but the routable address space of v6 if the device is configured for a v4 network, and applications can get patches to prefer a v6 connection (apparently even though some applications claim to try to make a v6 connection first, it doesn't usually work for me in practice). This at least buys you the time and flexibility of transitioning the chicken while the egg finishes gestating/maturing. We all realize that every v4 frontend server has to support v6 before clients can be transitioned. However, I don't see a problem with giving everyone a v4 and a v6 in the meantime while the servers are upgraded. This means middle-man upgrades first, and basically every link between an internet host has to natively support both ipv4 and ipv6. If you just used RAs you don't have to support dhcpv6 yet, and dhcpv4 handles the stuff RAs don't for the clients. Perhaps i'm over-simplifying. (edit) Also, completely separate thought: why the hell isn't Obama offering a discount to help transition like they did with TV? That was a pointless upgrade while this is a real looming problem. Can somebody get Google and Microsoft in a room and make them form an IPv6 lobby?
- loup-vaillant 16y ago
  > I don't see a problem with giving everyone a v4 and a v6 in the meantime while the servers are upgraded The problem is the total absence of short term benefit, while the cost is not null (in money, time, or cognitive load). So, even if it's better for everyone to go IPv6, it's worse for each individual to move first. So everyone wants to move last.
  - peterwwillis 16y ago
    The short term benefit in my proposal is being completely backwards-compatible and avoiding the problems of tunneling and other proposed workarounds while providing IPv6 routing where necessary. It doesn't "fix" the problem of running out of IPv4 address space (unless a given ISP decides to switch to IPv6-only, require its customers to upgrade, and turn on a multihomed IPv4 address for extreme cases). What it does do is allow the transition to take place. Everyone should be shouting at the top of our lungs at ISPs to support this so we can get this chicken/egg scenario over with. People are basically in denial. The cost is never going to be null and everyone has to move eventually. Server admins actually have the bulk of the responsibility here for getting the whole internet migrated to IPv6. It's their services we want to use and network addresses are just a way of getting to them. The problem is they have seemingly no accountability. I tried to hold the admin of xkcd.com's feet to the fire and I got rebuffed. Unless there's a substantive potential for their customers to abandon them they don't really give a crap (hopefully because they have other things to take care of). And in the meantime they can claim they don't need to move because the rest of the network isn't ready for them yet. So tell ISPs to multihome already and we can then start telling server admins to get their shit together because the rest of the network is ready for them.

188 points by soundsop 16y ago

It looks like the article ignores important fact that IP4 address is used to determine location and whether the sender is spammer or not. When IP addresses are easily available, it would be harder to maintain such locations and spam databases. It looks to me that IPv6 is a waste of time and would eventually be replaced by some other technology.

Groxx 16y ago
Like? And when? And on what hardware? That address space issue still looms - putting it off another 20 years won't help anything. IPv6 stuff is available now, the problem is in using two different formats - introducing a new format is unlikely to solve that issue.
narrator 16y ago
Naah.. The government will just require your unique citizen identifier in the bottom 64 bits. You won't be able to sign up for an ISP or a cell phone or any other connected device without it. Why do you think they made the address space so absurdly huge?
- derefr 16y ago
  Who is this "the government?" In fact, I heard somewhere that the government of any arbitrary spammer is just as likely as not to be a whole different government!
  - Groxx 16y ago
    Clearly the narrator is referring to that meta-governing-body, The Government. You know, the one all the conspiracy theorists never see, because it's OMG REAL, and therefore not a conspiracy. Narrators, however, have outside knowledge of the system they narrate, so they would be in a position to know of such a system.
    - narrator 16y ago
      Ok, it's a paranoid theory for now but I couldn't think of any other possible reason for such a large address space besides being permanent unique identifcation of clients, like a mac address. The bandwidth wasted on sending those addresses around multiplied by every packet on the internet seems ridiculously wastefull otherwise. For instance, there will probably never be 2^128 packets created and sent on the internet between now and the heat death of the universe.
      - Groxx 16y ago
        Wasn't meaning to shoot down the paranoia, just having fun with / at your username, as I saw the potential for fun :) It's certainly excessive, but more layers = more efficient routing, and I'd assume they don't want to go through all this again in a mere 1000 years when we're populating 5 planets, everyone has 100+ network connected devices, and data centers have billions. And everyone tweets.
        narrator 16y ago
        You don't understand how large 2^128 is do you? Let's quit all this handwavy crap about how that's a nice big number and look at how absurdly big it is. The number of seconds since the universe started is 13.75 billion * 86400 * 365 = 4.3 x 10 ^ 17 seconds. U.S Internet traffic was 18 exabytes (1 exabyte=10^18 bytes) a year, so let's just say that that we are sending 18 exabytes a second since the beginning of the universe and we are counting each byte. Yes, each set of 8 1s and 0s. How many is that? 4.3 x 10 ^17 * 18 * 10^18 = 7.74 * 10 ^36. 2^128= 3.4 + 10 ^ 38 / (7.74 * 10^36 ) =~ 43. So you could have a different ip address for every byte sent over the Internet, assuming the traffic for the whole year was sent over the course of 1 second for every second in 43 times the current age of the universe.
        Groxx 16y ago
        I understand it perfectly well, yes. I also understand that people like to buy ranges of IP addresses. This much space makes it not only easy, they can sell large ranges nearly indefinitely. Sell + indefinitely = yes, from their viewpoint.
garyrichardson 16y ago
Blacklisting IP's is typically based on the behavior of the address. More importantly, networks tend to be listed if a certain percentage of addresses on it send spam, act like a bot, etc. Location databases are based on the owner of the netblock. There are still networks in in IPv6. Typically, with IPv6, MAC addresses take up the right 48 bits of the 128 bit IPv6 address. other 90 bits are used for subnetting/routing. The new spam and location databases will focus on these 90 bits, just like location databases usually focus on the /24.
jwegan 16y ago
I find it hard to believe that the transition from IPv4 to IPv6 which has been anticipated for nearly two decades and is supported by all major hardware and software vendors (albeit with the issues mentioned in the article) will simply be discarded because software engineers will have to think a bit more carefully than just banning people based on IP (which is already a bad way to detect spammers since it is very common for many people to share the same IP if they are behind a NAT). Furthermore, for location it would be no harder than IPv4 since location databases, just like routing rely on prefixing which doesn't go away with IPv6. Also because the IPv6 address space is so big, there are event proposals to allocate blocks of the address space to each country and then the country can further distribute its block among all the various cities/regions of the country which would greatly simplify determining location based on IP.

Groxx 16y ago

I still fail to see an issue in any of this if the rollout moves from backbone-to-users, and not the other way around. Which is the only order which makes much sense anyway - if the backbones can't route your packet, what's the point in speaking that language? ISP-level NATs don't make sense, except in connecting external-IPv6 to internal-IPv4, in which case: so? Only serve up the IPv4 connections which currently exist, creating no new ones and dynamically mapping no ports, and pass through all IPv6. And if I recall correctly, IPv4 addresses are reserved in a range of IPv6 addresses already, so translating is a non-issue if the in-between is all IPv6. Any attempt to access IPv6-only addresses from IPv4 get fake IPv4 addresses, probably as some hashed value so repeat connections yield the same result. External-IPv4 to internal-IPv6: yeah, full of issues. Who gets port 80 once you start sharing external IP addresses? SSL ports? How about all those port-specific email servers? But not the reverse. I could be missing something obvious, though. IANAIETF expert by any stretch of the imagination. Anyone care to correct me? (edited for a bit more, and less block-of-text-iness)

btilly 16y ago
There is sort of IPV4 in IPV6. It is there. It is not universally supported. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv6#IPv4-mapped_IPv6_addresses http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv6#IPv4-mapped_IPv6_addresses for more.
seanlinmt 16y ago
Yes, it does depend on whether your upstream provider, i.e. ISP supports IPv6. DNS root servers supports IPv6 and most domain name services should support IPv6 by now. There is no NAT in IPv6. The address that you get should be globally routable, Unless of course your ISP have any IP filters in place. In the end it will depend on how your ISP allocates IP addresses to you. Initially, the main issue was non-IPv6 capable CPE devices like your cheapo ADSL modem. The way around this was via Teredo tunneling, tunneling on IPv6 packets within IPv4 UDP packets. Windows Vista and above supports IPv6 pretty well out of the box including Teredo tunnelling out of the box. Most BSD flavours are alright via the KAME project... not too sure about Darwin though. Anyway, it's been awhile since I've worked in the IPv6 area so god knows what else they've come up with.
16y ago

stretchwithme 16y ago

one thing that can be done when the transition is made. we could make an initial switch of all IPv6-capable machines for a short initial period that would reveal all machines not capable, then switch back to IPv4 for enough time to get those now very aware of their problem. We could do that for several weekends prior to the real switch. Such an approach would require a lot of software to be changed, to be sure. But it might be worth it.

viraptor 16y ago
Yup - that's exactly what customers will allow you to do. Especially if you're running ISP / ITSP, your customers will be glad you disconnected most of their devices while testing this new thing they know nothing about and care about even less.

ck2 16y ago

The class E block of IPv4 (240.0.0.0/4) has 268 million addresses available but no existing version of Windows will see/talk to them. So just sue Microsoft to make a patch available since they obviously aren't going to fix that on their own and you bought IPv4 a few more years.

mseebach 16y ago
61 million smartphones sold in Q2. Your solution will last little longer than a year, assuming perfect allocation of that block.
- ck2 16y ago
  Can we NAT verizon and at&t? lol
  - loup-vaillant 16y ago
    They're not, but they do. At least here in France, the main carriers put every single smart-phone under a NAT router. While IP hasn't ran out yet. They don't want their customers to run servers on their smart-phones.
koenigdavidmj 16y ago
People who do multicast may not be too happy.

cletus 16y ago

One thing that doesn't make sense to me is that people are comparing the number of internet-connected devices to the size of the IPv4 address space, implying each device needs its own IPv4 address. This is obviously not the case. NAT (Network Address Translation) techniques can hide thousands of devices behind one IP address. In fact, for security reasons, it's advisable to not have every device directly on the internet. I have an ADSL modem/router at home with NAT, which makes substandard firewall solutions as what is provided by Windows pretty much unnecessary. So perhaps we simply need to reclaim large blocks (particularly those universities and companies that have large A blocks of ~16 million addresses) and save IP addresses for each machine for ISPs, servers and those that actually need them. Of course that's hard to mandate but like many things you can solve it with market forces: charge people who have more than, say, 128 IP addresses on a scale such that the most economic thing to do is transition away from that and give up their addresses.

tjpick 16y ago
coming back after the fact and saying "I know you got a sweet deal on those IP addresses when they were going cheap but we've run out and want them back so we're going to charge you extra" isn't really going to fly. You could argue the same case with domain squatters, or real estate, but it just can't work that way. You could buy them back -- at a premium of course.
- bostonvaulter2 16y ago
  You could hypothetically charge a small yearly fee for each IP Address owned. Of course there would be lots of financial hurdles with this approach.
  - wmf 16y ago
    ARIN already charges fees for IP addresses; I suppose they take 'em back if you don't pay. https://www.arin.net/fees/fee_schedule.html https://www.arin.net/fees/fee_schedule.html Note that legacy holders don't pay fees on their massive /8s.
16y ago

ThomPete 16y ago

It might be ugly but cellphones around the world rejoice. Your battery is going to love you for it.

viraptor 16y ago
Could you explain what you mean? What do cellphones have to do with this?
- ThomPete 16y ago
  When your cellphone get a static IP instead of a dynamic one your cellphone should be able to save up to 50% energy. http://www.usipv6.com/what_is_ipv6.php http://www.usipv6.com/what_is_ipv6.php "IPv6 is compatible with 3G wireless (near) broadband and has other features that support greater mobility. There will be two billion mobile phones by 2006 and (at least) two addresses are required per mobile phone, so just enabling every mobile phone will require more IP addresses than are left with IPv4. Static addresses can also double battery life by not wasting power by checking whether a call is completed so the carrier can grab back the dynamic IP address, which wastes a great deal of power."
  - gxti 16y ago
    That seems quite optimistic. Do you have a source from someone who knows something about electronics engineering instead of networking?
    - ThomPete 16y ago
      I heard a Nokia engineer talk about it in some Podcast. Let me see if I can dig it up. Edit: He (the Nokia engineer didn't talk about the 50%, that's only that article) only talked about better battery life in general. Whether the 50% is true I only have that article to point to.
  - viraptor 16y ago
    I'll have to call [citation needed] on "double battery life". I have 3 jabber accounts with keepalives, skype with it's own keepalives, sip with reregistration and pinging, additional status messages are transmitted every couple of seconds on all of them. If I turn all of them off, my battery life does not increase 2 times. ~5-10% the last time I checked. I really doubt disabling the dhcp-equivalent on 3G can improve the battery life 2 times.

acqq 16y ago

Anybody knows how the 128 bits in the addresses are really going to be allocated? If everybody gets "lower 64-bit for a subnet," and every device simply considers that it should allow that the subnet is whatever is a slave of it, we end up using only the upper part, and then if you again give big chunks of upper 64 bits to different entities like it happened with IPv4, there's still real chance that even if the space is big it remains inefficient, especially if upper 64 bits are separated to encode some special assumptions about routing or whatever. Is there any text about this whole subject, which just doesn't brag that 128 bits is "a lot?"

storborg 16y ago
Those are some pretty big assumptions. But, even if only 64 bits were used, that's still enough space for every human on earth to have 2.75 billion IPv6 addresses.
- acqq 16y ago
  Only if there are no distribution rules in upper 64 bits, which is not going to happen. That's why I'd like to know the planned allocation process. Do you know anything about it? I posted my question to get exactly that info.
  - magamiako 16y ago
    As the wikipedia article states, and as the IANA assignments are coming through--you, as your personal self, gets a /48 block. Or rather, your "premises" gets a /48 block. If you're a small business owner with 10 computers, you get a /48 block. If you're a home user, you get a /48 block. If you're a large enterprise business, you get a /48 block. It's a rather significant waste of addressing and I really wish they had moved it over a few blocks, but that's the current plan. That said, you have to figure. Right now, for internet alone, we're using only 1/8th the space of the IPv6 address space. The plans are 2000::/3. Which essentially means 2000:: through 3FFF::. that's a rather ridiculous amount of hosts. It comes out to 2^125 hosts. 4.25352959 × 10^37 hosts on the internet. It's unfathomably large. So it doesn't really matter if huge chunks are wasted. You won't ever really use all of it anyway. I agree that the IPv6 space is ridiculously large, but that's kind of the point. They realized that the internet infrastructure will only continue to grow--and they want to, at all costs, avoid any problem with hitting the limit of addressing at any point in the future. The larger it grows, the more of a problem it will be to change it later on.

signa11 16y ago

djb's description here: http://cr.yp.to/djbdns/ipv6mess.html http://cr.yp.to/djbdns/ipv6mess.html is pretty good too...

caf 16y ago
Aye. djb is pretty opinionated, but in this case he is spot on.
- trezor 16y ago
  I disagree. His main objection seems to be thatfor IPv6 to work, administrators would (shock) have to administer IPv6. As he says: They would 1. have to acquire IPv6 address-space and 2. they will have to add it to their DNS. That's it. Once that is done, 99% of things out there just work. If you run Windows and Active Directory, all you have to do is acquire address space, as AD does DNS for you automagically. If we can't expect administrators to put in this minimum of effort to make the internet work in the future, but instead expect them to be able to set up huge layered NAT infrastructures with all the extra effort and problems that leads to, something is horribly, horribly wrong. Really. IPv6 opponents seems to live under the illusion that IPv6 will create more work, which in itself is true, but they ignore the extra work required to make IPv4 work at all. Work at all today that is. It's not going to get better in the future.
  - caf 16y ago
    I believe his objection is that, being realistic about these things, administrators won't bother to seperately administer IPv6, when it doesn't confer any advantage to the first movers. It's not about what should happen, it's about what will, taking into account the reality of human behaviour. And even if 95% of sites out there did enable IPv6, then everyone will still want IPv4 addresses so that they can still reach that last 1-in-20 - the transition simply can't happen until all existing sites are reachable over v6. I don't think he's an "IPv6 opponent", I think he just makes a good case that there isn't a workable transition plan.

CrLf 16y ago

The real problem with IPv6 is that it focuses too much on the technical issues and mostly ignores the human issues. This is why it hasn't gained significant traction and, IMHO, won't even when the IANA runs out of unallocated IPv4 blocks. There are a few main issues with IPv4: 1. Everybody wants to have a public IP address, and that is making the available IP addresses run out really fast; 2. There are huge chunks of allocated addresses that are in fact unused. And there are also a number of public addressable /8's being used for internal networks for no good reason; 3. Splitting up wasted /8's in (geographically disperse) small chunks isn't feasible because routing tables would get huge. No. 1 is easy to solve: not everybody needs a public IP address, no matter what people say. Mobile phones can survive just fine with private addressing behind a NAT. Public addresses for mobile users could be handed out on a case-by-case basis, for an additional fee. No. 2 will come into play once we run out of address space. Scarcity will trigger a market for IPv4 addresses, and as any scarce resource, its use will be rationalized and made more efficient. No. 3 is the most tricky. But that's where IPv6 really appears as the problem solver. Internet backbones will have a different structure than the IPv4 addressing implies, and that structure will be made with IPv6. IPv4 will be tunneled over IPv6 networks with its own structure. In fact, this has been done for a long while inside the ISP's networks using MPLS (IP packets enter the ISP network and are then routed using MPLS until they exit into another ISP/carrier's network). Those multiple MPLS domains will become a single IPv6 domain. The structure of the Internet will change when IPv4 addresses become scarce, that's for sure, but I seriously doubt IPv6 will gain acceptance at the network endpoints. There is just too much legacy for that to happen in the next 30 years at least. I belive in scarcity dynamics, so I'm not too worried. Also I also belive NAT to be a good solution for private networks and don't agree with the view that NAT is evil.

BerislavLopac 16y ago
1. "not everybody needs a public IP address": sure, and there is no need for more than 6 computers on the entire world, ever. In my opinion, stalling the transition hurts innovation; while it's true that as the things are at present public addresses are not an imperative, new technologies like P2P, which would greatly benefit from public addresses, open a whole new realm of possibilities. 2. Again correct, assuming that there is no cheaper alternative to the "addresses market". But it exists, and is (mostly) free. Once the providers realize that it's less expensive (longterm) to switch to IPv6 than to keep buying new addresses, they'll do it, even such a solution might prolong things even more. In general, most of "solutions" to the IPv4 crisis represent a sizable effort, which will only increase as the addresses become more scarce; and the sum of it will be much larger than the effort of simply switching to v6. We'll see how it will turn out though.

mgkimsal 16y ago

Couple random points: I just bought a new consumer router last year (actually, come to think of it, 2). Neither have current support in the admin screens for IPv6 - it's the standard 4 box dotted quad input only. Yes, a firmware upgrade can solve this, but this was 2009 at the time - how much more time do hardware vendors need to put this in consumer products, where we'll see arguably the most pain (in terms of hand-holding service requirements)? Also, relating to screens, a huge number (large majority?) of software is coded specifically to the dotted-quad format. I think we'd have seen more adoption if the plan we're migrating to had simply added a couple more dots to it. Easier for people to think about at the end, and would have given us a moderately larger pool base, easier way of thinking about new address spaces (visually, I mean). 64.27.78.45.134.240 where you tell people that the first two (or last two) now correspond to new addresses, and 'old' addressed simply have two leading 0s, would have made transition easier to swallow (IMHO). 2001:0f68:0000:0000:0000:0000:1986:69af, in comparison, even if shortened down, looks pretty alien. Adding two dotted quads would have given us 65k x 4 billion addresses. Yes, it's not IPv6-sized, I know. But in terms of the 'let's measure everything by how many IPs each person on the planet can have!' it would have been sufficient for a while - I think most people would be fine with fewer than 20k addresses each. I know this is wholly naive of me, and real hackers everywhere can do this stuff in their sleep. However, 'real hackers' aren't going to be dealing with the majority of this transition - it's going to be average joes trying to help their family get back on the internet over the phone after they mistype something on their new DLINK-950v6 router from Best Buy. We're well past the phase where we can back out, or I think even consider alternatives, but the impact to existing software screens is not to be underestimated. IPv6 may turn out to be the real Y2k.

BrandonM 16y ago
> how much more time do hardware vendors need to put this in consumer products, where we'll see arguably the most pain (in terms of hand-holding service requirements)? Under IPv6, won't customers just need a hub or a switch? Every IPv6-aware device in the home will just request a unique address directly from the ISP, completely eliminating the need for home routers. Of course, devices still needing IPv4 would need some other solution. Of course, that doesn't come without a tradeoff (as mentioned in the submission). Those IPv6 devices will need to be aware that they are connected to the Internet at large, and security will need to be addressed accordingly.

tptacek 16y ago

Consider carefully: to really deploy IPv6, we'll need to change most of our networking software (clients and servers) to handle v6 addresses. This would be hard enough if the v6 migration was a one-liner. But it isn't. Beyond the fact that you have to handle both sockaddr_in and sockaddr_in6, note that v4 addresses are scalar values for C programs. C does not have a scalar 128 bit type. Our v6 future is NAT'd to the horizon. If that's the case, what's the major win for v6 to this generation? The notion that we're imminently going to run out of v4 addresses is at least somewhat artificial, since we run fiat allocation schemes right now and could migrate to a market-based allocation to replace it. There are companies addressing desktop machines with routable /16 components because they don't believe in NAT; there are companies grandfathered in to /8(!) allocations. A lot of this waste might stop if people had to pay for it.

loup-vaillant 16y ago
What you are proposing is likely to trigger (or at least prolong) a dark age of the internet. And I'm not exaggerating the slightest. If people have to pay for IP addresses, then the internet will be divided in two: those who can pay, and those who can't run a server. And I predict that the crushing majority of people who use the internet will be of the second category. This would obviously be a catastrophe for freedom of speech and even privacy. The major win for v6 is enormous: an IP for everyone, and the possibility for a server at every home, which will at last give us the decentralized internet we should have had in the first place.
- tptacek 16y ago
  If it costs $5/yr for a single IP address, I'm not too concerned about the cost. Meanwhile, most of the applications YC-types build don't necessarily need routable IP addresses. In a better world, most of our content would be delivered via overlay networks that abstract away that detail anyways. In the immediacy, what matters is the DNS. We are in a dark age of the Internet, and it's our own doing. We've tethered ourselves to an archaic protocol that already indentures us to massive telco and cable operators, and would even if we had portable /32's assigned directly and personally from ARIN. I don't see why we should be focusing all our engineering efforts on this one technological detail, tethering us forever to the idea that a license to speak on the Internet entails an IP address. There's 15+ years of research behind better networking topologies that care no more about IP addresses than a home router cares about Ethernet MAC addresses. Let's go that direction. It's easier, and probably better.

SanjayUttam 16y ago

There is clearly a debate going on in this thread regarding whether or not we are running out of address space/whether or not we need truly globally routeable IPs, etc. Assuming that we do need to go the IPv6 route, for a second... I wouldn't really expect any businesses to go the way of IPv6 unless there was some kind of 1) Financial benefit, or 2) A law that required them to do so. Otherwise, there is really no reason to spend any time/money on it (Even if it is negligible). I can't find the source, but I believe at one point (maybe still) the Japanese govt. was providing cash incentives (tax benefits, etc.) for businesses to go the IPv6 route.

ay 16y ago

I am one of the authors of a draft that describes how to make the transition, at least for the "client" apps (like HTTP), more straightforward: http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-wing-http-new-tech http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-wing-http-new-tech Also, for the rogue RAs, there is a solution too: http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-v6ops-ra-guard http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-v6ops-ra-guard (currently shipping in some products already). For security, there are better approaches that do not compromise the applications transparency as much as the filters do: http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-vyncke-advanced-ipv6-security http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-vyncke-advanced-ipv6-securi... To summarize, knowing Iljitch personally, I hoped for a more sober article. v4->v6 transition is not going to be easy, sure. But the article does come through as having a slightly hysteric tone, which is unfortunate. As for "no customers" stance that I hear every now and then: Just today I had a chat with a large-ish service provider. They have quite a lot of enterprise customers for IPv6 today. XS4ALL provides IPv6 in .nl today. free.fr has been doing it for years already. Finally, to end on a cheerful note - some folks have found this video funny, hopefully you might as well: http://www.xtranormal.com/watch/7011357/ http://www.xtranormal.com/watch/7011357/ - though I do not claim to have the best sense of humor.

tptacek 16y ago
What's the value proposition of an IPv6 address to any of (a) my mom, (b) a YC web app founder, or (c) a Fortune 500 company in the industry standard best-practices configuration of private non-routable addresses for internal hosts sitting behind a series of firewalls and proxies set up for policy reasons? A customer use case for any one of these scenarios would be enlightening.
- ay 16y ago
  (a) - When she would have to choose whether to pay $10 or $30 per month for the facebook. (b) - Experience, when down the road a year or two from now it will mean some real eyeballs. If you do not care about serving to mobile users, no need to bother. Maybe there are startups that are not just about webapps. (c) - they already have IPv6. On Vista and Windows7. Just that it travels over Teredo. Reason: visibility into the end-station traffic. I am not trying to convince you that IPv6 is the panacea. If you show me the compelling argument towards the standard p2p substrate that would not abuse the links between the ISPs too much, is standardized, has implementations in all the major OSes as part of standard distribution with similar API - or freely available in the source code form with the BSD or MIT license - I'd be happy to see it. Oh yes - and you can show the business cases for it for the above three participants, too, if you like. Oh, and of course it has to traverse multiple layers of NATs too. I'd seriously use it in some of the pet projects.

m104 16y ago

No plan B? Hah! Let's face it already: there will be no IPv6 transition. Eight years ago, I was in the "more effort needed" school of thought about IPv6. I figured we'd slowly update our programs and toolkits and libraries and reference material and college textbooks and switches, etc., and by 2005 it'd be about the right time to switch over. It will be painful, I thought, but necessary and ultimately a very good thing. So I waited and watched, much as I'm sure many of the HN readers have been doing. I figured that those people who are smarter and more connected than me would form the leadership of the IPv6 migration and show the rest of us the way to 128-bit Internet addressing bliss. Realistically, though, we're no closer to a workable migration to IPv6 today then we were in 2002. Since then, we've managed to switch from analog to digital TV (at least in the US), migrate most software from ISO-8859-1 to some flavor of Unicode, settle the Blueray/HD-DVD format war, increment the USB protocol twice, formalize HTML into HTML 4.0 and XHTML and HTML 5, and virtualize or emulate every major operating system onto every major hardware platform. But nothing of any substance has happened on the IPv6 front. The reasons for the lack of progress have been clearly laid out by others, but the unspoken sad reality is that we're wasting our time with IPv6. Even to say "IPv6 migration" implies that it will happen and thus IPv6 is the only solution to IPv4's woes. We're torturing ourselves with IPv6 by going on like this and it's not bringing us any closer to a solution! At this point, there's no reason not to start looking for workable extensions to IPv4 (and TCP/IP in general) to address the issues we're having. I'd bet that a small group of dedicated engineers could come up with an compatible extension to IPv4 (that expands the address space) and could develop a workable migration strategy, example code, socket library modifications, and a compatible version of Ubuntu all within a year. Imagine the excitement if IPv6 could be sent to the circular file and a clear alternative was not only proposed, but downloadable. So, in short, that's my solution: cast off IPv6 as the death march project that it is and get excited about a minimum viable product (see what I did there?) alternative to IPv4. Oh, and since this is HN: I'm sure that there's just no way to make money from an extension to IPv4. No consumer going to need a converter box, to sit between their modem and LAN, right? I mean, the government would have to offer rebates. Madness! No businesses are going to need consulting services or contracted coding work. Nope. It certainly won't be like Y2K, but even it it was I'm sure no one made any money from that transition...

16y ago

ankimal 16y ago

IPv6 always reminds me of this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_y36fG2Oba0 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_y36fG2Oba0

jrockway 16y ago

As far as I can tell, IPv6 is already here. My home network has IPv6, and all my servers have IPv6. Doing this amounted to one line of config on the servers, two lines of config on my router (one to tell it the ipv6 address, one to start rtadvd), and no configuration on my workstations. And, I have better IPv6 connectivity from home than IPv4. Traceroute to Google: $ traceroute google.com traceroute to google.com (209.85.225.104), 30 hops max, 60 byte packets 1 blinky.internal (10.0.0.2) 0.267 ms 0.249 ms 0.230 ms 2 dsl253-036-001.chi1.dsl.speakeasy.net (66.253.36.1) 15.046 ms 19.018 ms 23.002 ms 3 220.ge-0-1-0.cr2.chi1.speakeasy.net (69.17.83.153) 16.991 ms 20.965 ms 24.950 ms 4 core1-2-2-0.ord.net.google.com (206.223.119.21) 26.932 ms 28.911 ms 30.893 ms 5 72.14.236.178 (72.14.236.178) 32.875 ms 72.14.236.176 (72.14.236.176) 87.863 ms 72.14.236.178 (72.14.236.178) 34.822 ms 6 209.85.241.22 (209.85.241.22) 37.802 ms 72.14.232.141 (72.14.232.141) 39.334 ms 41.312 ms 7 209.85.241.35 (209.85.241.35) 43.294 ms 209.85.241.29 (209.85.241.29) 23.635 ms 23.689 ms 8 66.249.95.138 (66.249.95.138) 27.670 ms 72.14.239.18 (72.14.239.18) 29.652 ms 209.85.248.102 (209.85.248.102) 31.626 ms 9 iy-in-f104.1e100.net (209.85.225.104) 33.608 ms 35.591 ms 37.573 ms Traceroute6 to IPv6 Google: $ traceroute6 ipv6.google.com traceroute to ipv6.google.com (2001:4860:b007::68), 30 hops max, 80 byte packets 1 blinky.jrock.us (2001:470:1f11:488::1) 0.273 ms 0.246 ms 0.228 ms 2 jrockway-1.tunnel.tserv9.chi1.ipv6.he.net (2001:470:1f10:488::1) 17.464 ms 19.492 ms 21.437 ms 3 gige-g3-4.core1.chi1.ipv6.he.net (2001:470:0:6e::1) 31.410 ms 33.398 ms 35.383 ms 4 * * * 5 2001:4860::1:0:3f7 (2001:4860::1:0:3f7) 29.284 ms 2001:4860::1:0:92e (2001:4860::1:0:92e) 37.278 ms 2001:4860::1:0:3f7 (2001:4860::1:0:3f7) 39.263 ms 6 2001:4860::1:0:1d1 (2001:4860::1:0:1d1) 46.248 ms 2001:4860::1:0:2776 (2001:4860::1:0:2776) 47.653 ms 49.593 ms 7 2001:4860::38 (2001:4860::38) 51.579 ms 36.400 ms 36.944 ms 8 2001:4860:0:1::f (2001:4860:0:1::f) 35.849 ms 2001:4860:0:1::d (2001:4860:0:1::d) 33.996 ms 33.369 ms 9 iy-in-x68.1e100.net (2001:4860:b007::68) 27.974 ms 31.954 ms 31.951 ms Same number of hops, but less latency!

ay 16y ago
Nice to see the specific data. Another data point: last year at FOSDEM we had more than just a couple of v6-connected hosts, here're some stats I kept for fun: http://stdio.be/onsite.fosdem.net/ http://stdio.be/onsite.fosdem.net/ Needless to say, noone ran after the conference participants to upgrade the software on their devices.

jodrellblank 16y ago

Countdown of IPv4 address allocation: http://twitter.com/ipv4countdown http://twitter.com/ipv4countdown

runjake 16y ago

I'm not discounting the article's assertions, but we're doing fine with a ~7,000 node IPv4/IPv6 network. Each node is running a reasonably modern client OS (80/20 Mac OS X/Windows 7, mostly). Most of our servers are Windows Server 2008 and some 2003. We do have several Linux servers, as well. Pretty much all the service they run seamlessly translate to IPv6 (Exchange, IIS, SMB, AFP, Apache [and its modules]) Each node and server get an IPv4 address and an IPv6 address. Mac OS X and Windows prefer IPv6 transport over IPv4 and most users have no clue when they go to Google, they're doing so over IPv6. nearly all of our internal web, email, and file sharing traffic is over IPv6. Nobody knows any different. There has been small, interesting issues, but we're able to resolve them pretty quickly and haven't run into anything even marginally major. From the looks of things, the transition will be like the fader control on an audio mixer. Nodes will have dual stacks, and IPv4 will fade out gradually and IPv6 will, at the same time, fade in gradually, and nobody will be the wiser (other than the poor network programmers who have to get their network code IPv6 ready, which frankly, they should've begun years ago). Implementing a large-ish scale IPv6 network (dual stacked, of course) has been relatively pain-free (in our experience).

tptacek 16y ago
I think the subtext of this article is that schemes like this appear to work because you're really relying on IPv4 for guaranteed network access; the true migration to IPv6 (the "magic moment" as DJB would call it) hasn't happened until people can feasibly not depend on IPv4 for a production network. If everyone has to be dual-stacked, then we're committed indefinitely to making IPv4 workable. Which is fine! But it rather lessens the urgency of converting people to IPv6.
- runjake 16y ago
  But are we really relying on IPv4 when at least 90% of our network traffic has seamlessly transitioned to IPv6? It's almost funny to say this, but it seems like IPv4 is already legacy for us. Sure, some external websites haven't yet converted to IPv6, so the stack falls back to IPv4, but for the most part (and 90% is probably a very conservative estimate) IPv6 is king across the WAN. The downside to IPv6 is that it's a steep learning curve, and virtually nobody else in the org is even marginally familiar with it. If you're familiar with bit math, IPv6 is a bit easier, but then you get into routing and DHCPv6 which tend to differ significantly in some areas from their v4 counterparts. Also, I'm finding that certain vendors' (cough Cisco) IPv6 implementations aren't nearly as tight as they claim. It wasn't until July 2010 that Cisco really implemented DHCPv6 in a usable manner in IOS. Now if only Apple iOS devices supported IPv6 ;)

peterwwillis 16y ago

I could just be misinformed/sleepy, but why can't we all just multihome? Upgrade or replace (tech refresh, anyone?) all gear which doesn't natively support v6 and start running both networks at the same time. You hardly need to support anything but the routable address space of v6 if the device is configured for a v4 network, and applications can get patches to prefer a v6 connection (apparently even though some applications claim to try to make a v6 connection first, it doesn't usually work for me in practice). This at least buys you the time and flexibility of transitioning the chicken while the egg finishes gestating/maturing. We all realize that every v4 frontend server has to support v6 before clients can be transitioned. However, I don't see a problem with giving everyone a v4 and a v6 in the meantime while the servers are upgraded. This means middle-man upgrades first, and basically every link between an internet host has to natively support both ipv4 and ipv6. If you just used RAs you don't have to support dhcpv6 yet, and dhcpv4 handles the stuff RAs don't for the clients. Perhaps i'm over-simplifying. (edit) Also, completely separate thought: why the hell isn't Obama offering a discount to help transition like they did with TV? That was a pointless upgrade while this is a real looming problem. Can somebody get Google and Microsoft in a room and make them form an IPv6 lobby?

loup-vaillant 16y ago
> I don't see a problem with giving everyone a v4 and a v6 in the meantime while the servers are upgraded The problem is the total absence of short term benefit, while the cost is not null (in money, time, or cognitive load). So, even if it's better for everyone to go IPv6, it's worse for each individual to move first. So everyone wants to move last.
- peterwwillis 16y ago
  The short term benefit in my proposal is being completely backwards-compatible and avoiding the problems of tunneling and other proposed workarounds while providing IPv6 routing where necessary. It doesn't "fix" the problem of running out of IPv4 address space (unless a given ISP decides to switch to IPv6-only, require its customers to upgrade, and turn on a multihomed IPv4 address for extreme cases). What it does do is allow the transition to take place. Everyone should be shouting at the top of our lungs at ISPs to support this so we can get this chicken/egg scenario over with. People are basically in denial. The cost is never going to be null and everyone has to move eventually. Server admins actually have the bulk of the responsibility here for getting the whole internet migrated to IPv6. It's their services we want to use and network addresses are just a way of getting to them. The problem is they have seemingly no accountability. I tried to hold the admin of xkcd.com's feet to the fire and I got rebuffed. Unless there's a substantive potential for their customers to abandon them they don't really give a crap (hopefully because they have other things to take care of). And in the meantime they can claim they don't need to move because the rest of the network isn't ready for them yet. So tell ISPs to multihome already and we can then start telling server admins to get their shit together because the rest of the network is ready for them.