Is IPv6 A Solution In Search Of A Problem?
from the seems-like-it dept
A few weeks ago, David Siegel of Global Crossing looked at some high-profile websites and found that none of them have made the switch to IPv6, the supposed replacement for today's 32-bit Internet addressing scheme. The IPv6 protocols have been finalized for a decade, and major operating systems have supported it for several years, so one would expect Internet-savvy companies like Google and Microsoft to have started running IPv6 versions of their sites. But it appears that so far, nothing of the sort has happened. Indeed, progress toward an IPv6-based Internet appears to be at a virtual standstill. The situation becomes less mysterious when one realizes that the primary rationale for the switch to IPv6 -- the exhaustion of the IP address space -- is basically bogus. It's true that if Internet governance authorities continue handing out IP addresses, they'll eventually run out. But the best solution to this isn't necessarily a massively disruptive transition to a totally new addressing scheme. It may very well be a lot cheaper to continue working within the constraints of the existing address space. Technologies like NAT allow many users to share a single IP address. And Internet governance bodies can facilitate the creation of a robust market for unused IP addresses, so that those who need additional IP addresses can easily purchase them from someone who has more than they need. For example, Apple, Ford, General Electric, and several other Fortune 500 companies currently control blocks of 16 million IP addresses each. These companies should be given a straightforward way to auction off the unused portions of their blocks for the use of other Internet firms. There would be plenty of IP addresses to go around if firms had a financial incentive to give up unused addresses.An interesting analogy here is to the continued health of the x86 architecture that now lies at the heart of virtually all desktop and notebook computers. For decades, people have been predicting that x86 was on its last legs because it is a clumsy, register-starved architectures. In the early 1990s, everyone expected RISC chips like the PowerPC and Alpha to clobber x86-based chips in performance. In the late 1990s, Intel itself bought into the hype and attempted to push the computer industry to its brand new Itanium architecture. Yet the predicted demise of x86 never happened. The x86 platform had extremely broad support in the industry, and it has turned out that the costs of limping along with a crappy architecture are smaller than the costs of switching to an entirely new one. I think something similar may be true of IPv4 addressing. As cramped as its address space may be, the costs of switching the entire Internet to a new addressing scheme will be enormous, and the benefits are far from obvious. So my prediction is that IPv6 will continue to be "just around the corner" for the foreseeable future, as the bulk of network owners find it more affordable to just make do with the addressing scheme they're already using.
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Filed Under: ipv6
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The first is the argument against NAT: It breaks end-to-end addressing. Not only is my client running into problems with interchanging equipment from different sites due to overlapping address spaces, there's no simple way to talk to a particular device from the central office for troubleshooting or diagnostics (and back-direction connections like VoIP require annoying and expensive hacks). IPv6 solves both problems and incidentally provides an easy way to track equipment by MAC address (we're using EUI-64 addresses).
Additionally, IPv6 helps reduce the size of the routing table. While in a scenario like my client's aggregating routes is primarily useful for minimizing the usage of metered satellite or cellular network connections, the primary problem the Internet as a whole is facing isn't that IPv4 address space is being exhausted--it's that the global routing table is getting unmanageably large. Dividing the class A address assignments, while freeing up some space, would actually make the routing-table problem worse. IPv6, since it's designed with aggregability as a primary virtue (and multihomes site instead of carving out tiny AS fiefdoms), helps keep routing complexity down.
(Also, of course, many areas in Asia and Europe are adopting IPv6 because of address exhaustion, but that's another issue entirely.)
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IPV6 from a network operator perspective
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Address Exhaustion
That time is obviously not quite here yet, but it is hard to get people to buy stuff that will e-mail trouble reports your phone then respond to commands from that phone when the network is not ready to support a bazillion more addresses.
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IPv6
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Re: fossil fuel problem
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8hioZ7C6HLs
They have found a way to grow algae in vertical
stacks thus making the light depth issue a non-issue,
and now have the growth rate at 100,000 gal/acre/yr.
Palm oil at like 700 gal/acre/yr is now cheaper than
middle east oil, so this blows that completely away.
We now know how to get by without middle east oil,
and Valcent has a working prototype, and can use
specific strains of algae to get the specific long
carbon chains for the specific fuel types.
Adios Islamic Oil...
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Re: Re: fossil fuel problem
Problem is it's too costly. We need to open up ANWR. Plan and simple...
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Niche Marketing
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Give me IPV6 any day
NAT is not a solution to address crowding.
There are other reasons to use a larger address space besides address exhaustion, specifically easier routing tables.
I check every couple months if any ISP in my area offers IPV6, most don't have a single mention of it on their sites.
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It's not running out of addresses, it's running ou
Unfortunately, there's no way for ISP's to cost-effectively route addresses
unless they're within hierarchically assigned address blocks. Even as it is,
some ISP's are having trouble keeping up with the routing. Once you have
individual customers requiring that their tiny slice of market-obtained
addresses be routed globally, the overall routing tables will grow far
faster than all of the default-free-zone routers can be continuously
upgraded.
The cost to switch to IPv6 is enormous, but the benefit of continuing
to have scalable routing beats the alternative of no Internet at all.
/John
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Re: It's not running out of addresses, it's runnin
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Re: Re: It's not running out of addresses, it's ru
IPv6's solution is to assign a different /48 prefix from each of the ISP's; then each system in the network has multiple IP addresses, each of which is both in the ISP's contiguous block and is uniquely routable through that ISP.
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Analogy Police Alert
Ths is the Analogy Police! We have you surrounded! Step away from the keyboard!
Your analogy with x86 falls down because the latter is being supplanted by x86-64, giving us a bigger address space and various performance enhancements while maintaining backward compatibility. There is no way to do the same with IPv4. NAT is a horrible hack which makes all kinds of things--e.g. multimedia streaming, running servers--very difficult to do.
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Global Crossing?
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NAT stinks
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Re: NAT stinks
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The upgrade path, as x86-64 must be coexistance
Of course, that means that operating systems have to actually know how to drop malformed packets, not suffer from buffer overflows or any other lower level attacks like that.
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NAT doesn't work
And it is so much fun wiring the ports in my router to go to all my machines.
NAT was a solution in search of a problem. Instead of inventing NAT, they should have switched to IPv6 a long time ago.
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misguided
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Follow the Money
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No killer-app for IPv6, no actual solution yet
Its much touted "security" is simply mandated IPSEC compliance, which is a solved problem in v4 space from a stack perspective (what platform that needs it doesn't have it?), and meantime, BTW, v6 does not magically solve any of the issues of key management, transport overhead, or peer association & configuration that make IPSEC a real pain. And otherwise your websites or home networks are not more secure simply because you run IPv6. If you are selling v6 on the basis of improved security, your product is somewhat oily and snake-like.
"Mobility" is promised, and honestly I see it as possibly even replacing 3rd party VPN functionality... some day when it is actually delivered and usable and scalable and secure and...
Address exhaustion is real, but current IPv6 deployment models either need a dual v4/v6 stack which is impossible to scale if you, um, run out of v4 space -OR- you have a massive flag day where everyone in v4 land jumps the rails and goes direct to v6, like that is going to happen -OR- you develop a workable technology to interop between v4 only and v6 only nodes, using much-derided NAT to actually get work done like it does already, but this time on a much larger scale. I see the last scenario obviously as the one actually being played out, and much like what happened with NAT, once it does, the pressure on V4 space is off because, golly, we can expand the client space with V6 and they can still reach V4 just fine, so what's the problem? That scenario is likely to make most ivory-tower IETF types foam at the mouth, especially because NAT is involved, but it is historically how we have seen the free market of the Internet deal with problems- find a solution that is good enough, sometimes barely, but typically far from perfect. Migration may happen over a long time period but I see a network that for a long time is a merged v4/v6 space.
There are real problems that us nerdy network types understand, but the holy wars over things like NAT, address space management/prefix length, and multi-homing just make it look to the masses and the bosses like we don't have our act together. Combine that with the fact that IPv6 isn't going to improve the user experience, isn't going to make networks better/faster/cheaper, and that there are other possible means of averting meltdown such as more aggressive v4 space management, and the question becomes "this v6 thing makes my facebook/game/outlook/crackberry *better* *how*, again?"
Overall I think the takeaway from this article is that the market will follow the least path of resistance and greatest path of attractance, that we should recognize that such solutions will spring up in the free market, and that if they solve the problems that IPv6 is aimed at, IPv6 is going to go the way of ISO/CLNS networking- too much trouble for too little return on investment to the end user.
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IPv6 offers a few features im sure your all aware over IPv4 but at the cost of a more chatty network which leads to performance degrades. And with not much of a IPv4 run out scare any more the IPv4 will live on for some time yet. Eventually IPv6 will take over but its going to be a while. Who knows... we may just skip IPv6 all together and up to another IP version.
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nat is rubbish and rubbish aint cool.
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