

A crisis in the making: Only 4% of the Internet supports IPv6 - vaksel
http://royal.pingdom.com/2009/03/06/a-crisis-in-the-making-only-4-of-the-internet-supports-ipv6/

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dfranke
Fears about IP address exhaustion are overblown. X-day is the day that IP
address scarcity _begins_ to become a problem, not the day that the intertubes
burst and flood everyone's basement. We appear to be headed for an IP shortage
because IP addresses are presently distributed by a central authority, "to
each according to his need". IANA allocation policies undercut the fair market
value of IP addresses, so the free market that could exist for them currently
doesn't. But once IANA stops handing them out, there's nothing keeping it from
forming.

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tptacek
Given a free market for IP numbers, I think we'd also discover that they're
not all that valuable for most entities.

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wmf
Good; then people who need them can just buy them cheap rather than having to
beg, borrow, or steal them.

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jeremyw
Vint Cerf and others intimate full interoperability between IPv4 and IPv6
(i.e. I can get to every site, regardless of my network) was beaten to death
in the standards committees, but ultimately there was no technical consensus
to be had. Unfortunately, it was a mandatory component to adoption. How did
they convince themselves it would happen otherwise? They failed.

Now we'll have a clusterfuck of overlay technologies, dual-stack corner cases
and last-minute crises. Yay, IETF.

How well Dan's article has stood up: <http://cr.yp.to/djbdns/ipv6mess.html>

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hapless
This guy looks at 4% uptake and says the sky is falling. I look at 4% uptake
and say we're in really great shape.

According to this guy's somewhat pessimistic view, we're at least two years
from the _beginning_ of IPv4 shortages. We already have 4% uptake when there's
very little incentive to do anything about ipv6. When the pressure comes on a
little bit, uptake will skyrocket.

The great thing is that there's a network effect here: the more people get on
ipv6, the more benefit there is to each additional punter. It's more and more
attractive as more people join. I think we'll have no problem rolling this
snowball.

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pmjordan
I keep meaning to set my local network up for IPv6 and then asking my ISP if
they can hook me up with an IPv6 range. And if not, keep pushing. I think that
will have to be the way forward. Application support is actually pretty decent
at this stage, it's infrastructure that's the main problem. Oh, and I'll
probably have to upgrade my DSL modem...

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tptacek
Application support in the major mainstream software market isn't horrible,
but support outside of it is awful. The cost of porting software to IPv6 is a
major hidden drag on adoption. Which doesn't bother me much, since I'm not
sold on IPv6 at all.

~~~
pmjordan
Out of interest, what alternative solution would you prefer? Starting to use
NAT and private/unrouted address spaces for everything seems like a terrible
way to deal with the situation. (and I've had various problems with VPNs as a
result of it; learnt my lesson and use "rarer" subnets like 172.16-31 and
192.168.x where x != {0, 1, 2, 10, 100} now) I'm surprised nobody seems to be
suggesting we break up some of the Class A networks - IBM, HP etc. surely
don't need 16-32M addresses.

I admittedly know very little about the shortcomings of IPv6; I do know it
handles fragmentation differently, which is apparently causing problems with
tunnels, and as far as I can tell, it's a much "bigger" standard, not just
IPv4 with a bigger address space, with some parts that are possibly completely
pointless. (a little like multicast in IPv4 which seems to get very little
practical use) As a developer, is there any particular technology other than
IPv4 and IPv6 that I should be targetting?

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jrockway
I get the impression that tptacek hates everything that wasn't either invented
in the 1950s, or that he didn't invent himself.

IPv6 is the future of IP, regardless of its flaws. It is much farther along
than anything else, and I don't see that changing. (And I don't see anyone
using IPv6 until IPv4 addresses become Really Expensive, which probably won't
be for 10 or 15 more years.)

~~~
tptacek
Fair enough, I misspoke. I'm not sold on the urgency of 4-to-6. I guess I
don't have much a problem with IPv6 itself.

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electromagnetic
I don't see the urgency being a matter of years, due to the fact that most
ISPs are adopting NAT's. I guess my problem is, I don't see why ISPs won't
just start deploying NAT's to convert IPv4 to IPv6. I mean with the span of
IPv6 addresses, why can't they pin an IPv6 to an IPv4?

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krschultz
I've seen and agreed with this warning several times, but today I realized I
have yet to do anything about it. My router and my machines are all using IPv4
and I haven't a clue as to how well my ISP supports it. What about everyone
else here? If were not on it in any numbers yet, the general population will
take many years.

~~~
electromagnetic
I've long doubted this as a serious problem. With the amount of packet
filtering and what not that ISP's can manage on the fly, why can't they simply
use a NAT to translate an IPv4 into an IPv6? It would fix the problem with
most NAT's as both IPv4 and IPv6 can be tied together allowing a permanent
IPv4 address to be a IPv6 on the net.

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metatronscube
No, this is not a problem (speaking as a Network Design Engineer) these kind
of articles are completely overblown and based on nothing but fantasies and
hype. Address exhaustion can be very easily controlled at the ISP-NAT level
and we are already building in IPv6 capable devices in our networks...its not
a problem.

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igglepiggle
Maybe the push towards DNSSEC will sweep IPv6 along with it.. we can't afford
not to have either of these things, and both require some significant
maintenance work - why not roll out both at the same time? Maybe DNSSEC should
only support IPv6?

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tptacek
Couple things.

First, the "push towards DNSSEC" is largely just a superficial trend story.
There are operational problems with DNSSEC that will probably severely retard
DNSSEC adoption. I'm not going to pretend DNSSEC isn't more likely to happen
after the last few months, but none of the problem with DNSSEC that almost
left it DOA before have changed.

Second, there's no real relationship between DNSSEC and IPv6. DNSSEC signs
arbitrary records, including A.

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igglepiggle
[http://www.circleid.com/posts/verisign_com_net_domain_dnssec...](http://www.circleid.com/posts/verisign_com_net_domain_dnssec_by_2011/)

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tptacek
Again, a couple things. First, the CircleID site is a proponent of DNSSEC.
Second, this isn't the first time Verisign has publicly committed to DNSSEC.
Finally, just because Verisign says it's going to adopt the protocol, doesn't
mean the protocol is going to work.

