So, IPV6

mejinks

mejinks

mejinks

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As a consumer with consumer grade kit, would I have to change all my networking gear or will the changeover be seamless if and when it comes?
 
Nothing public yet, but it's not something you really need to worry yourself about.
 
I can see big corporate users and business's changing first to free IPv4 address's up for home users. Then new subscribers given modems with ipv6 capability.

ISP's 'Should' be IPv6 ready as most current Cisco/Juniper/HP gear supports IPv6 to some extent.
 
matthab said:
I can see big corporate users and business's changing first to free IPv4 address's up for home users. Then new subscribers given modems with ipv6 capability.
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Nah, they can't sacrifice connectivity. Best we can hope for is that they go dual stack ... which doesn't free up anything.

Basically we're screwed with a chicken-egg situation. ISP's can't afford to not allocate IPv4 addresses, because then their customers wouldn't have access to most of the web, and websites/businesses can't afford to stop using IPv4 because so many of their customers are are still on it.

The solution, of course, is to go dual stack, until we reach the point where IPv4 can be phased out, but this is going to take many years and things are going to get very messy. ISPs and webhosts should have been providing IPv6 connectivity and equipment as standard for years now.
I foresee that IPv4 addresses are going to start being sold off for high prices due to the demand for them. Bad news for the developing world/china, the cost of getting an Internet connection installed is going to skyrocket. It's that or have some kind of nasty proxy or Dual NAT system going on.

Hopefully once enough of the major websites have gone Dual stack, ISP's will start offering IPv6 only connections (which will be less expensive due to not having to buy an IPv4 address) Once this starts happening the incentive will switch for more websites to go IPv6 (or risk losing customers) and things should snowball in the right direction.
 
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(Assuming your ISP actually goes for IPv4) Isn't it only your modem that needs to support it anyways?

All your PCs/Printers/switches etc can keep using your 192.168.0.* IPv4 addresses internally and your router will simply be NATing them to a shiny new external IPv6 address instead of the old external IPv4 address.
 
Westyfield2 said:
(Assuming your ISP actually goes for IPv4) Isn't it only your modem that needs to support it anyways?

All your PCs/Printers/switches etc can keep using your 192.168.0.* IPv4 addresses internally and your router will simply be NATing them to a shiny new external IPv6 address instead of the old external IPv4 address.
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No, you can't translate between v4 and v6 effectively (there are mechanisms but they're rubbish and break things), and NAT shouldn't exist in the IPv6 world anyway, there's no longer any need for it (thank god). If you want to contact IPv6 services the device you are using will need an IPv6 address.
 
matthab said:
I can see big corporate users and business's changing first to free IPv4 address's up for home users. Then new subscribers given modems with ipv6 capability.

ISP's 'Should' be IPv6 ready as most current Cisco/Juniper/HP gear supports IPv6 to some extent.
Click to expand...

Soon we'll be able to sell IPv4 address, a day that commercially I look forwards to very much, as the 8000 odd addresses we have attached to legacy hosting will become viable to decommission and sell for a handsome sum (I imagine in the region of £40-50 per IP). Giving them back is not on my list of priorities.
 
Zarf said:
The solution, of course, is to go dual stack, until we reach the point where IPv4 can be phased out, but this is going to take many years and things are going to get very messy. ISPs and webhosts should have been providing IPv6 connectivity and equipment as standard for years now.
I foresee that IPv4 addresses are going to start being sold off for high prices due to the demand for them. Bad news for the developing world/china, the cost of getting an Internet connection installed is going to skyrocket. It's that or have some kind of nasty proxy or Dual NAT system going on.
Click to expand...

Of course the whole idea is that we'd already be at the dual-stack phase by now because IPv6 has, let's face it, been around for quite a while now.
By not adopting it sooner and waiting until there was a problem, everyone has made things much worse for themselves!
 
matthab said:
I beleive you use NAT to go from IPv6 to v4. I seem to remeber while doing my CCNA something coming up about it.

http://ipv6.com/articles/nat/NAT-In-Depth.htm
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NAT-PT exists but is of extremely limited real world use. If your PC had an IPv6 only address then you could NAT that out of a IPv4 address to the world (only not really in the real world because that requires some DNS mangling for it to work in real life and that DNS mangling is fundamentally incompatible with DNSSEC).

A v4 only host talking to a v6 server isn't going to work with NAT either because given the v6 address the host won't have a clue what to do with natively. If it could tunnel it to your gateway it would work but that requires host config changes...so why not just do the easier, neater thing and make it dual stack?
 
NAT-PT was moved to historical status due to various operational reasons. You do get a subset if it's capabilities in NAT64/DNS64 which translates from ipv6 to ipv4, but only for sessions initiated from the ipv6 side. IVI allows two way translation, but requires a one to one mapping of addresses.
Mobile operators are likely to be the first to deploy NAT64 in the short term, as they will be amongst the first networks to be ipv6 only(on the handset/mobile interface). Microsoft also have a form of it available in one of their products which is aimed at enterprises, Forefront UAG DirectAccess.

Generally NAT64/DNS64 works very well for things like web browsing and email. Only broken things i ran into when testing it for a month were MSN (well documented for having ipv4 literals in the code) and some speedtest.net servers (also due to the use of ipv4 literals). It doesn't work for online gaming, which means its not a practical solution for myself.

For now, myself, and my employers, are firmly in the dual stack camp. Depletion of our existing ipv4 pool is not a concern. With churn we expect we can continue to provide dual stack long enough that ipv6 only connections won't be a cause for concern when we do eventually make them the default option for our products.
 
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mejinks said:
Aren't places like china and japan ipv6? How do we get their websites if its all incompatible?
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Not exclusively, China at least have a lot of ipv6 already deployed in their CERNET2 network. (I'm really not too hot on Japan, I know NTT have given various presentation on their IPv6 plans, but I don't how far along the actual deployments are)

But they use plenty of ipv4 aswell, and your connections to Chinese websites are likely to be to native IPv4. China telecom have been allocated millions of additional ipv4 addresses over the last six months, which is what you'd expect for a country of their size which is still growing their networks. This indicates they they will also be dependant on IPv4 for the immediate future aswell.
 
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