5 ms·

On June 6th, World IPv6 Launch Will Change The World Forever

66 points by danyork 14y ago

epall 14y ago
I've tried and failed to set up IPv6 on my MBP a few times now. HE seems to provide free tunneling, but I can't figure out if it's compatible with my AT&T U-Verse RG. Is there a way to enable IPv6 tunneling on OS X in a way that doesn't require firewall configuration?
- wmf 14y ago
  Miredo should work. Also, parts of U-Verse are already being upgraded to v6 automatically.
- lloeki 14y ago
  HE provides a 6in4 tunnel, that is it uses protocol 41, hence your router/firewall has to be able to forward proto41. While SixXS provides proto41 tunnels too, they also provide AYIYA tunnels, a (standardized) encapsulation protocol able to pass NATs and handle IPv4 local endpoint changes with ease. For this you need to use their companion (open-source) tool called aiccu. Another advantage of aiccu is that it uses a protocol for autoconfiguring the tunnel (TIC), so you don't need to do some ifconfig incantations. Just put your creds in the config file, do aiccu start or load the plist and you're IPv6 enabled. I've written a homebrew formula for aiccu [0] and made a pull request, so it should be available straight from brew search/install aiccu. [0] https://github.com/lloeki/homebrew/blob/aiccu/Library/Formula/aiccu.rb https://github.com/lloeki/homebrew/blob/aiccu/Library/Formul...
iuguy 14y ago
And on June 7th, everyone and their dog will still be using IPv4.
- jinushaun 14y ago
  Read the article. On June 6, only 1% of traffic on the Internet will permanently switch to ipv6.
  - iuguy 14y ago
    I could be really snarky here, but I won't. My earlier comment was a bit of a response to the article's claim that 1% of network traffic will somehow change the world forever. That there's an 'IPv6 Launch Day' for a protocol that's been around since the 90s and still failed to gain significant traction tells you that this won't really change the world at all.
    - danyork 14y ago
      Hey, it's a start! :-)
  - lloeki 14y ago
    on June 6, CDNs like Akamai will enable IPv6 too. As the exposure grows by enabling AAAA records and as people have IPv6 enabled locally, traffic will only grow from now on. We're solving a chicken and egg problem by providing more and more chicken so eggs ought to follow.
ghshephard 14y ago
So, it's been about five years since we rolled out extensive use of IPv6 on our internal network, and, I can report, that it just works. OSPF with IPv6 is, well, like OSPF with IPv4. Address Assignment from routers to downstream devices works reliably. After a few years, the address "2001:1868:209:FFFD:0013:50FF:FE12:3456" is pretty much as straightforward to parse as 67.228.107.138 (and, in some ways, is actually much easier to understand and remember) We now have about 10 million devices happily communicating via IPv6 (mostly using RFC2893s IPv6-in-IPv4 to hop through carrier IPv4 networks) over corporate networks to back office applications - and all the processes we developed for IPv4, such as anycast, and variable-cost route advertisements, carry over just fine to IPv6. As with any technology - you need to learn some things the hard way (the one that bit us hard was "Do not hard code your IPv6 router the way you did in the IPv4 into your hosts if you use the EUI-64 auto-promotion of router advertisements against the VLAN on your router - either (A) statically assign a 64 bit address to that router interface, or (B) use auto-router detection on your hosts") - but that's probably true of any technology. My feeling is IPv6 is a pretty straight forward and simple technology, that has been slow to ramp, and won't achieve 100% penetration for quite a while - but has a great, and guaranteed future ahead of it. Looking forward to 6/6!
- furyofantares 14y ago
  > (and, in some ways, is actually much easier to understand and remember) Can you explain this?
  - digitalsushi 14y ago
    One can chose addresses that maximize compressible sequences of zeros. If I were allocated a subnet of 2002:/, I could make my computer's address 2002::2 and my router 2002::1. Realistically the first 64 bits are going to be very ugly, so I disagree that a v6 will ever be much easier to remember than a v4 address. Especially with the 0 compression being back-ported to v4 stacks, running on the 10. network - You can ping 10.1 as 10.0.0.1 on many stacks now.
  - duskwuff 14y ago
    My guess: Since any given organization's IPv6 allocation is so large, there's no need to densely pack the addresses that you're using, so it's much easier to stuff human-readable information into the address. For instance, one of the segments of $work's IPv6 addresses is an ID indicating what facility the machine is located at.
squozzer 14y ago
IPv6 on 6/6 -- cue Iron Maiden...
- mindcrime 14y ago
  In the mist, dark figures move and twist Was all this for real or just some kind of Hell? Not sure ipv6 qualifies as "some kind of hell," but I'll take any reason for an Iron Maiden reference. That said, the "hell" part seems to be getting big ISP's to roll out ipv6 support. Last I checked, Time Warner Cable still didn't have ipv6 available to RoadRunner customers, at least not here in NC. :-(
- vorg 14y ago
  June 6th is a gr8te day in IT this year. It's also the day version 2.0 of the grOOvy programming language is being released to the world, at their annual European conference (http://gr8conf.eu http://gr8conf.eu).
Aloisius 14y ago
I have IPv6 at my San Francisco office provided by Cogent. Unfortunately, Cogent has quite a few peering disputes which means I can access say, Facebook over IPv6, but not Google. I can only hope that Google flipping on AAAA records permanently will change this, but I wonder how fractured the rest of the IPv6 world is.
- rwg 14y ago
  Cogent is its own little fractured IPv6 world. If you're relying on them as your sole transit provider, you will likely never have a "complete" view of the IPv6 Internet. This is true for all single-homed networks, but it's even more true if you're single-homed to Cogent. Also, Google adding AAAAs to their hostnames won't change Cogent wanting to turn peers into customers by shutting off peering connections. This (now removed) news post on ESnet's website when they were depeered by Cogent is pretty telling, especially the bit about Cogent lying to their own customers about the nature of ESnet's unreachability: http://web.archive.org/web/20110610220320/http://es.net/news-and-publications/esnet-news/2011/important-status-announcement-regarding-cogent-connectivity/ http://web.archive.org/web/20110610220320/http://es.net/news... If you want to see this attitude change, vote with your wallet -- stop purchasing transit from Cogent, and then tell your former Cogent sales rep exactly why you're no longer purchasing transit from them. Until their bottom line is impacted, they have no incentive to change.
chair6 14y ago
Test whether your site/app is IPv6-enabled here -- http://ready.chair6.net/ http://ready.chair6.net/ Examples: http://ready.chair6.net/?url=arin.net http://ready.chair6.net/?url=arin.net http://ready.chair6.net/?url=wikipedia.org http://ready.chair6.net/?url=wikipedia.org
masterleep 14y ago
What will drive this is hosts providing free IPv6 static addresses but charging increasing amounts for IPv4 ones.
- danyork 14y ago
  Indeed, I expect we'll see that kind of thing happening as IPv4 exhaustion increases.
webwanderings 14y ago
Does Windows XP supports v6? Not unless you install it. IPv6 will be seeing the same fate as what IE6 has within the corporate networks.
- wtallis 14y ago
  So? Large corporate networks are where a lack of IPv6 will hurt the least. They can do large-scale NAT with no trouble, because they have a centralized authority that knows which machines need port forwarding, and can guarantee that most clients don't need any port forwarding. They can also afford to buy more IPv4 addresses as needed.
tomjen3 14y ago
What will this means for those of who only have an IPv4 ip?
- wmf 14y ago
  Nothing.
  - sneak 14y ago
    Somebody's never heard of 6to4...
    - wmf 14y ago
      I'm very familiar with 6to4. It's basically a slower way to reach stuff that you could already reach over IPv4, so there's no point in using it. None of the practical IPv6 transition scenarios include 6to4 or Teredo or tunnel brokers, so if you're "testing" that stuff you're not really helping.
    - deleted 14y ago
      [deleted]
- lloeki 14y ago
  There's a test at http://test-ipv6.com http://test-ipv6.com that will give you a aggregated (or detailed if you wish) report of influence of IPv6 upon both IPv4 and IPv6 in your configuration. Its goal is to help you troubleshoot some problems even if you have only IPv4.
hm2k 14y ago
Neither my router nor my ISP supports IPv6.
- lloeki 14y ago
  Solutions for those locked in IPv4: Set up a tunnel on a machine: Teredo for a single host, or 6to4/6in4/AYIYA via HE or SixXS, then use that machine as a router to distribute a /64. For those with an Apple Airport Extreme or a Time Capsule, using the Airport Utility 5.x you can trivially set up a 6to4 tunnel if you have a public IPv4 address on its WAN side, or easily set up a HE 6in4 tunnel. It takes me from 5min to 15min to enable a machine or a whole network with internet-enabled IPv6.
patrickgzill 14y ago
IPV6 is unlikely, IMHO, to be very visible. Web and email servers that are publicly accessible, and your desktop or laptop that you connect at home or at a Wifi point, will probably still be IPv4. IPv6 will be used internally by large companies, by large DSL ISPs and Comcast, but the interface the end-user will see, will be IPv4. I think 99% of the usage will occur in non-visible ways - Comcast will have all their home-subscriber modems put out IPv4 on the side you see, but v6 on the pieces you don't, such as the management interface that lets them remotely configure and manage your modem. Combined with large 6to4 gateways they will run on their edge (where they connect with non-v6 enabled systems), most people will not really notice anything. The tipping point will come, but not for another 5 years I think, that is, 2 more hardware upgrade generations. Mobile of course, will go to v6 first, since no-one cares as to how their phone accesses the web.
- digitalsushi 14y ago
  If the customer sees an IPv4 WAN address in the medium distance future, it's likely to be a private address. Many ISPs are going to do "carrier grade nat", which just means that the NAT your current router is doing will be aggregated at the ISP. Your router will be more of a simple bridge device. (It's bad to perform double network address translation of packets, and the relevant DS-Lite rfcs discuss this). I think this will be the tipping point where I start seeing a v6 address as the first class citizen. When I have to start bugging my ISP for a port mapping, I will prefer to just have the entire session occur natively on v6 because it will no longer be the toy, it will have graduated to the tool.
jgrahamc 14y ago
Folks who use CloudFlare already have IPv6 as a free option just be flicking the IPv6 switch in the control panel. Even if the real web server is IPv4 only it's possible to go IPv6 immediately with that.
- robotmay 14y ago
  I noticed this the other day and just toggled it on myself. Making IPv6 easy to implement will hopefully ramp up adoption.

66 points by danyork 14y ago

epall 14y ago

I've tried and failed to set up IPv6 on my MBP a few times now. HE seems to provide free tunneling, but I can't figure out if it's compatible with my AT&T U-Verse RG. Is there a way to enable IPv6 tunneling on OS X in a way that doesn't require firewall configuration?

wmf 14y ago
Miredo should work. Also, parts of U-Verse are already being upgraded to v6 automatically.
lloeki 14y ago
HE provides a 6in4 tunnel, that is it uses protocol 41, hence your router/firewall has to be able to forward proto41. While SixXS provides proto41 tunnels too, they also provide AYIYA tunnels, a (standardized) encapsulation protocol able to pass NATs and handle IPv4 local endpoint changes with ease. For this you need to use their companion (open-source) tool called aiccu. Another advantage of aiccu is that it uses a protocol for autoconfiguring the tunnel (TIC), so you don't need to do some ifconfig incantations. Just put your creds in the config file, do aiccu start or load the plist and you're IPv6 enabled. I've written a homebrew formula for aiccu [0] and made a pull request, so it should be available straight from brew search/install aiccu. [0] https://github.com/lloeki/homebrew/blob/aiccu/Library/Formula/aiccu.rb https://github.com/lloeki/homebrew/blob/aiccu/Library/Formul...

iuguy 14y ago

And on June 7th, everyone and their dog will still be using IPv4.

jinushaun 14y ago
Read the article. On June 6, only 1% of traffic on the Internet will permanently switch to ipv6.
- iuguy 14y ago
  I could be really snarky here, but I won't. My earlier comment was a bit of a response to the article's claim that 1% of network traffic will somehow change the world forever. That there's an 'IPv6 Launch Day' for a protocol that's been around since the 90s and still failed to gain significant traction tells you that this won't really change the world at all.
  - danyork 14y ago
    Hey, it's a start! :-)
- lloeki 14y ago
  on June 6, CDNs like Akamai will enable IPv6 too. As the exposure grows by enabling AAAA records and as people have IPv6 enabled locally, traffic will only grow from now on. We're solving a chicken and egg problem by providing more and more chicken so eggs ought to follow.

ghshephard 14y ago

So, it's been about five years since we rolled out extensive use of IPv6 on our internal network, and, I can report, that it just works. OSPF with IPv6 is, well, like OSPF with IPv4. Address Assignment from routers to downstream devices works reliably. After a few years, the address "2001:1868:209:FFFD:0013:50FF:FE12:3456" is pretty much as straightforward to parse as 67.228.107.138 (and, in some ways, is actually much easier to understand and remember) We now have about 10 million devices happily communicating via IPv6 (mostly using RFC2893s IPv6-in-IPv4 to hop through carrier IPv4 networks) over corporate networks to back office applications - and all the processes we developed for IPv4, such as anycast, and variable-cost route advertisements, carry over just fine to IPv6. As with any technology - you need to learn some things the hard way (the one that bit us hard was "Do not hard code your IPv6 router the way you did in the IPv4 into your hosts if you use the EUI-64 auto-promotion of router advertisements against the VLAN on your router - either (A) statically assign a 64 bit address to that router interface, or (B) use auto-router detection on your hosts") - but that's probably true of any technology. My feeling is IPv6 is a pretty straight forward and simple technology, that has been slow to ramp, and won't achieve 100% penetration for quite a while - but has a great, and guaranteed future ahead of it. Looking forward to 6/6!

furyofantares 14y ago
> (and, in some ways, is actually much easier to understand and remember) Can you explain this?
- digitalsushi 14y ago
  One can chose addresses that maximize compressible sequences of zeros. If I were allocated a subnet of 2002:/, I could make my computer's address 2002::2 and my router 2002::1. Realistically the first 64 bits are going to be very ugly, so I disagree that a v6 will ever be much easier to remember than a v4 address. Especially with the 0 compression being back-ported to v4 stacks, running on the 10. network - You can ping 10.1 as 10.0.0.1 on many stacks now.
- duskwuff 14y ago
  My guess: Since any given organization's IPv6 allocation is so large, there's no need to densely pack the addresses that you're using, so it's much easier to stuff human-readable information into the address. For instance, one of the segments of $work's IPv6 addresses is an ID indicating what facility the machine is located at.

squozzer 14y ago

IPv6 on 6/6 -- cue Iron Maiden...

mindcrime 14y ago
In the mist, dark figures move and twist Was all this for real or just some kind of Hell? Not sure ipv6 qualifies as "some kind of hell," but I'll take any reason for an Iron Maiden reference. That said, the "hell" part seems to be getting big ISP's to roll out ipv6 support. Last I checked, Time Warner Cable still didn't have ipv6 available to RoadRunner customers, at least not here in NC. :-(
vorg 14y ago
June 6th is a gr8te day in IT this year. It's also the day version 2.0 of the grOOvy programming language is being released to the world, at their annual European conference (http://gr8conf.eu http://gr8conf.eu).

Aloisius 14y ago

I have IPv6 at my San Francisco office provided by Cogent. Unfortunately, Cogent has quite a few peering disputes which means I can access say, Facebook over IPv6, but not Google. I can only hope that Google flipping on AAAA records permanently will change this, but I wonder how fractured the rest of the IPv6 world is.

rwg 14y ago
Cogent is its own little fractured IPv6 world. If you're relying on them as your sole transit provider, you will likely never have a "complete" view of the IPv6 Internet. This is true for all single-homed networks, but it's even more true if you're single-homed to Cogent. Also, Google adding AAAAs to their hostnames won't change Cogent wanting to turn peers into customers by shutting off peering connections. This (now removed) news post on ESnet's website when they were depeered by Cogent is pretty telling, especially the bit about Cogent lying to their own customers about the nature of ESnet's unreachability: http://web.archive.org/web/20110610220320/http://es.net/news-and-publications/esnet-news/2011/important-status-announcement-regarding-cogent-connectivity/ http://web.archive.org/web/20110610220320/http://es.net/news... If you want to see this attitude change, vote with your wallet -- stop purchasing transit from Cogent, and then tell your former Cogent sales rep exactly why you're no longer purchasing transit from them. Until their bottom line is impacted, they have no incentive to change.

chair6 14y ago

Test whether your site/app is IPv6-enabled here -- http://ready.chair6.net/ http://ready.chair6.net/ Examples: http://ready.chair6.net/?url=arin.net http://ready.chair6.net/?url=arin.net http://ready.chair6.net/?url=wikipedia.org http://ready.chair6.net/?url=wikipedia.org

masterleep 14y ago

What will drive this is hosts providing free IPv6 static addresses but charging increasing amounts for IPv4 ones.

danyork 14y ago
Indeed, I expect we'll see that kind of thing happening as IPv4 exhaustion increases.

webwanderings 14y ago

Does Windows XP supports v6? Not unless you install it. IPv6 will be seeing the same fate as what IE6 has within the corporate networks.

wtallis 14y ago
So? Large corporate networks are where a lack of IPv6 will hurt the least. They can do large-scale NAT with no trouble, because they have a centralized authority that knows which machines need port forwarding, and can guarantee that most clients don't need any port forwarding. They can also afford to buy more IPv4 addresses as needed.

tomjen3 14y ago

What will this means for those of who only have an IPv4 ip?

wmf 14y ago
Nothing.
- sneak 14y ago
  Somebody's never heard of 6to4...
  - wmf 14y ago
    I'm very familiar with 6to4. It's basically a slower way to reach stuff that you could already reach over IPv4, so there's no point in using it. None of the practical IPv6 transition scenarios include 6to4 or Teredo or tunnel brokers, so if you're "testing" that stuff you're not really helping.
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
lloeki 14y ago
There's a test at http://test-ipv6.com http://test-ipv6.com that will give you a aggregated (or detailed if you wish) report of influence of IPv6 upon both IPv4 and IPv6 in your configuration. Its goal is to help you troubleshoot some problems even if you have only IPv4.

hm2k 14y ago

Neither my router nor my ISP supports IPv6.

lloeki 14y ago
Solutions for those locked in IPv4: Set up a tunnel on a machine: Teredo for a single host, or 6to4/6in4/AYIYA via HE or SixXS, then use that machine as a router to distribute a /64. For those with an Apple Airport Extreme or a Time Capsule, using the Airport Utility 5.x you can trivially set up a 6to4 tunnel if you have a public IPv4 address on its WAN side, or easily set up a HE 6in4 tunnel. It takes me from 5min to 15min to enable a machine or a whole network with internet-enabled IPv6.

patrickgzill 14y ago

IPV6 is unlikely, IMHO, to be very visible. Web and email servers that are publicly accessible, and your desktop or laptop that you connect at home or at a Wifi point, will probably still be IPv4. IPv6 will be used internally by large companies, by large DSL ISPs and Comcast, but the interface the end-user will see, will be IPv4. I think 99% of the usage will occur in non-visible ways - Comcast will have all their home-subscriber modems put out IPv4 on the side you see, but v6 on the pieces you don't, such as the management interface that lets them remotely configure and manage your modem. Combined with large 6to4 gateways they will run on their edge (where they connect with non-v6 enabled systems), most people will not really notice anything. The tipping point will come, but not for another 5 years I think, that is, 2 more hardware upgrade generations. Mobile of course, will go to v6 first, since no-one cares as to how their phone accesses the web.

digitalsushi 14y ago
If the customer sees an IPv4 WAN address in the medium distance future, it's likely to be a private address. Many ISPs are going to do "carrier grade nat", which just means that the NAT your current router is doing will be aggregated at the ISP. Your router will be more of a simple bridge device. (It's bad to perform double network address translation of packets, and the relevant DS-Lite rfcs discuss this). I think this will be the tipping point where I start seeing a v6 address as the first class citizen. When I have to start bugging my ISP for a port mapping, I will prefer to just have the entire session occur natively on v6 because it will no longer be the toy, it will have graduated to the tool.

jgrahamc 14y ago

Folks who use CloudFlare already have IPv6 as a free option just be flicking the IPv6 switch in the control panel. Even if the real web server is IPv4 only it's possible to go IPv6 immediately with that.

robotmay 14y ago
I noticed this the other day and just toggled it on myself. Making IPv6 easy to implement will hopefully ramp up adoption.