9 ms·
IPv6 is no longer considered optional
- mjwalshe 14y agoIts still a poor standard that should have died decades ago
- vladd 14y agoArguments?
- mkup 14y agoSince you didn't propose a better standard during these decades, IPv6 is likely to stay. Why it's poor btw?
- quink 14y agoMaybe he said this about IPv4 - it's still not applicable though. Either that, or he would have said the same thing about IPv4 twenty years ago.
- mjwalshe 14y agoyep I remember my boss telling me about ip exhaustion must have been around about 20 years ago.
- mjwalshe 14y agoNO Migration stratergy it was designed back when the internet was just some academic curiosity which ment you could do disruptive changes over the academic summer break. Even in the 80's it was obvious that this would not work for ipv4 to ipv6. IPv6 have been dropped 20+ years ago and a more fit for purporse stndard devloped.
- DougBTX 14y agoIt looks like they started work on IPv6 in 1994[1], so I doubt migration issues have been known about since the 80s. [1] http://www.ipv6.com/articles/general/timeline-of-ipv6.htm http://www.ipv6.com/articles/general/timeline-of-ipv6.htm
- mjwalshe 14y agoer they started talking about a replacement for ipv4 in the 80's
- mjwalshe 14y agowell I was only a lowly MPG2 back then :-) and probaly all the stadards work BT where doing at that was more towards OSI and SS7 standards - where inetropablity and uptime was the holy grail. Its peopel like Vint that took thier eye off the ball.
- rwmj 14y agoWhat they really should have done is extend IPv4 addresses using an option header in packets, which (with a small amount of effort) provides a fall-back and is nowhere near as disruptive as trying to enable IPv6 everywhere.
- zmb_ 14y agoIn theory, perhaps. In reality this is not feasible because the hardware guys would never go for it. The mere existence of an IPv4 header extension causes a packet to be kicked out of the hardware fast path (or dropped entirely) by all the router implementations that I know.
- mjwalshe 14y agoPrecisely the sort of thing I was getting at before I got modded down to oblivion.
- tomjen3 14y agoIt is not backwards compatible. Yeah I know that is HARD, but that is why we have smart people to write the standards.
- lrem 14y agoI wonder if a declaration like this will have any practical impact...
- TazeTSchnitzel 14y agoLet's hope device manufacturers add IPv6. Particularly for routers and phones.
- drucken 14y agoWhy do I get the feeling that there will never be a pure IPv6 solution. It does not seem possible to create a pure and complete IPv6 NAT solution. But NAT is way too useful and taken for granted to be removed. I honestly cannot believe they did not address this specifically during the standard's process! Why not learn from the past? Are Teredo-like 6-within-4 solutions the only future?
- simfoo 14y agoMaybe this question is stupid, but why do you consider NATs useful? I've always found them pretty obstructive (just look at Skype and other p2p software, they have to try and break through NATs or even use a proxy server). Or do you have other use cases in mind?
- vidarh 14y agoBeyond a lack of public IP's, it's the obstructive nature of it that makes it (sort of) useful. It's not really any safer than starting with a firewall where everything is denied by default and opening port by port of inbound traffic. But NAT'ing every internal address forces you into a pattern where the external IP is not tied to where the service is hosted at all - you need to explicitly map that in your firewall -, and where if you were to, say, accidentally turn off all your filtering, you leave yourself isolated instead of exposed. I don't think these are important enough to care about NAT once we switch to IPv6 - you can certainly be just as defensive through other means.
- Duff 14y agoLaziness, flexibility and cost. Lazy network admins assume that a private network protects them against poor planning and decision-making. Private networks give you more flexibility to do whatever crazy thing you want to do. For larger enterprise, this may mean building their own private internet. For smaller users in particular, NATing saves time and money. You don't have to wrangle with ISPs who want to bill by IP, or get an IP block assigned.
- calloc 14y ago
- islon 14y agoSo now they consider it not optional? I guess it took so long because they were thinking ipv4 would magically generate more ip numbers... The internet should be all ipv6 by now.
- ajb 14y agoThe irony is that pretty much all the silicon out there has supported IPv6 for the last 10 years, and what's holding it up is the software. This is because when you design a chip, you have to take into account what your customers will be using it for in a few years time, but for software, it's all about what your customers want yesterday. Since IPV6 has always been 'just around the corner', it gets into the hardware but not all the software.
- revelation 14y agoIts not clear what level of 'hardware' you are talking about. For most gadgets, the only hardware related to networking you will find is a chip that does ethernet and talks to the jack for you. Everything above (like IP) is done in software.
- ajb 14y agoI'm talking about routers, from the big devices in your datacentre/telco down to your dsl or cable home gateway. There's only a limited amount I can say about this ( at least, without having to think hard about I am allowed to say) but there really is a lot of silicon out there that knows what the layout of an IP packet is.
- chime 14y agoI think firmware is considered part of the hardware in this instance.
- trout 14y agoA NIC that talks ethernet doesn't mean it's in the hardware. It's more about the ASICs on the ports to handle high traffic rates. The NIC can send the packet on the wire, but inserting the IPv6 headers is done in hardware with ASICs. This is the difference between millions of packets per second versus tens of thousands.