

On June 6th, World IPv6 Launch Will Change The World Forever - danyork
http://www.internetsociety.org/deploy360/blog/2012/05/on-june-6th-world-ipv6-launch-will-change-the-world-forever/

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ghshephard
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
> (and, in some ways, is actually much easier to understand and remember)

Can you explain this?

~~~
ghshephard
First, my perspective is that IPv6, to some degree, abandons 15+ years of VLSM
(Variable Length Subnet Masks) - so, at a glance, without referring to a
subnet mask, you can identify what position of the address is a network, and
which portion is the host element. There is a 64 bit network and 64 bit host
field.

Second, The network portion for most enterprises is going to be a 48 bit super
net (which network admins will memorize within a few days of working within a
particularly company) followed by a 16 bit network portion. So, in the above
example, the 48 bit super net is 2001:1868:209 and the network portion is
FFFD.

So - now, when I see an IPv6 address, my eye automatically scans the network
portion, much, much more quickly than I did in the IPv4 world, where we had 30
or 40 IPv4 networks, many of them with their own strange /30, /28/ /26 /25,
etc.. net masks. I've been doing this for 16 years, and I still can't
transparently do the math in my head for all variants of IPv4 - and even 2-3
seconds of translating /27 into 5 bits into 32 addresses into boundaries of
0,32,64,96,128,etc... can break your concentration. That problem no longer
exists with IPv6. It's a 48 bit super net + 16 bit network for most
enterprises.

Now, for those who aren't using the privacy elements, you also have advantage
of embedding the MAC address in the address, so, for those of us who are OUI
geeks, we can also identify the equipment in the address so (it's the first 24
bits of the host portion, with a bit of bit twiddling the in 7bit Local/Global
spot) - and, we can also see whether proper EUI-64 expansion has taken place
(in the above example, it hasn't - the proper EUI-64 expansion would be
0213:50FF:FE12:3456)

So - at a glance, I see the network, sub network, and hardware, skim over the
FF:FE filler, and, the actual address - 12:3456 is simple to remember.

Finally - if you have a lot of hosts you are trying to put on a single
network, you don't have to play games. We routinely put 25,000 devices on a
single routed link, and we aren't concerned about rolling out 2,000 of those
25K device routed links for a particular instance. And we can (and have)
rolled out a hundred instances of such configurations, with no overlap in
addressing between any of them. Try that without gymnastics in the IPv4 world.
In IPv6 it just follows the simple rules of 48 bit supernet + 16 bit network +
64 bit host field.

It takes a couple years (or at least it took me a couple years) - but once the
brain's rewired - the additional structure is in _some way_, easier to
understand and remember -but obviously this is all within a particular
hardware and enterprise context. Clearly a Random 32 Bit IPv4 address is
easier to memorize than a random 128 Bit IPv6 address.

------
Aloisius
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
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...](http://web.archive.org/web/20110610220320/http://es.net/news-
and-publications/esnet-news/2011/important-status-announcement-regarding-
cogent-connectivity/)

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.

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

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

------
webwanderings
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
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.

------
chair6
Test whether your site/app is IPv6-enabled here -- <http://ready.chair6.net/>

Examples:

<http://ready.chair6.net/?url=arin.net>

<http://ready.chair6.net/?url=wikipedia.org>

------
patrickgzill
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
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
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
I noticed this the other day and just toggled it on myself. Making IPv6 easy
to implement will hopefully ramp up adoption.

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

~~~
jinushaun
Read the article. On June 6, only 1% of traffic on the Internet will
permanently switch to ipv6.

~~~
iuguy
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
Hey, it's a start! :-)

------
epall
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?

~~~
lloeki
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/Formul...](https://github.com/lloeki/homebrew/blob/aiccu/Library/Formula/aiccu.rb)

------
hm2k
Neither my router nor my ISP supports IPv6.

~~~
lloeki
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.

------
tomjen3
What will this means for those of who only have an IPv4 ip?

~~~
wmf
Nothing.

~~~
sneak
Somebody's never heard of 6to4...

~~~
wmf
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.

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

~~~
mindcrime
_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. :-(

