IPv6 Is Coming ... Brutha!

[Lemur]

Lots of articles cropping up about how we're running out of address space with IPv4, and grumblings about how nobody's making the move to IPv6 ... until now. That's right, suckas, Comcast is rolling out a super-sized can of 128-bit address space on your undeserving heineys.

What's that, you say? There's no place like 127.0.0.1? Shut yo' mouth! Kick up your gangster shoes and chill in your 0:0:0:0:0:0:0:1 localhost, my brutha.

I know, I know, you're all about the subnet and breaking it down old-school with a router and all that tired west-coast rap, but here's the deal -- all of that subnetting breaks a lot of apps, and makes it real hard to chill with VPNs and just about any point-to-point protocol.

Keep it real. Give every device its own addy, and watch the sparks fly.

If you need any more info about the IPv6 transition, you can learn it all right here.

[Xiahou]

I know, I know, you're all about the subnet and breaking it down old-school with a router and all that tired west-coast rap, but here's the deal -- all of that subnetting breaks a lot of apps, and makes it real hard to chill with VPNs and just about any point-to-point protocol.

Are you sure you don't mean NAT'ing? Subnetting shouldn't cause problems... unless it's not configured right, but that's hardly the technology's problem....

Anyhow.... Someone's actually going to use IPv6? They were talking about that back when I was still in college (almost a decade ago now ) and it's still never been widely adopted. Probably because the addresses are as confusing as hell.

"192.168.1.1" is one thing. But "2001:0db8:4545:3:200:f8ff:fe21:67cf" is going to take some getting used to.

Edit: Here's a fun article... The IPv6 mess.

[pevergreen]

But when we run out, do we have a choice.

I plan to deal with it when i have to. With so many people still on XP (Does xp have IPv6?) and IE6, it wont be an immediate switchover.

[Alexander the Pretty Good]

"192.168.1.1" is one thing. But "2001:0db8:4545:3:200:f8ff:fe21:67cf" is going to take some getting used to.

As someone without the mental dexterity to keep track of a string of numbers like an IP address, I'm hoping this will handicap people who can so I'm on the same playing field.

[Lemur]

Are you sure you don't mean NAT'ing?

Of course that's what I meant. Sloppy lemur! Bad, sloppy lemur! This is my penance ...

[Husar]

I'm currently doing communication networks at the uni and we still use IPv4, I thought IPv6 was 6 Bytes instead of 4 though, but 128 bits(16 Bytes) is a bit much...
Confusing indeed.

[naut]

I'm glad I'm not doing a networking major. I hated doing IPv4 stuff. IPv6 just looks... gah.

[Lemur]

Here's a longer, clearer article about the Comcast IPv6 trial:

Comcast plans four trials. The first one will use a transition technique that is still under development, called 6RD. 6RD is similar to the 6to4 automatic tunneling mechanism that is available in Windows (it's enabled automatically when the system has a public IPv4 address under Windows 7 and Vista). The difference is that 6RD only tunnels IPv6 packets across an IPv4-only part of the service provider's network, while 6to4 can tunnel across large parts of the Internet, possibly incurring slowdowns.

The second trial will be with native IPv6. Here, IPv6 packets are transmitted across the infrastructure without encapsulating them in IPv4 packets. IPv4 remains available, creating a "dual stack" deployment. "Native, dual-stack is central to our IPv6 strategy and we expect that the native dual-stack solution will be a significant part of the IPv6 transition, enabling IPv6 technology to evolve globally while still being able to provide seamless services to the traditional IPv4 Internet," says Comcast.

The third trial will basically be the opposite of the first: rather than encapsulate IPv6 packets in IPv4 packets in order to traverse IPv4-only network sections, IPv4 is now encapsulated in IPv6 to get across IPv6-only parts of the service provider network. The technique for this will be "Dual Stack Lite," a protocol that is being developed in the IETF Softwires working group, which is co-chaired by Comcast's Alain Durand. In Dual Stack Lite, the IPv4 hosts use private IPv4 addresses. A home router encapsulates those in IPv6 packets, and a "carrier grade NAT" both decapsulates the packets and performs Network Address Translation so that a lot of DS-Lite clients can share a single IPv4 address.

The fourth trial will evaluate how to provide IPv6 to business class customers.

And since I have been linking to Seventies exploitation films for no obvious reason, here's Sugar Hill and Her Zombie Hit Men.