Neowin's plan to go both IPv4 and IPv6 in the future?


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Hello,

Saw a thread with a IPv6 issue and Im wondering what are Neowin's plan to implement IPv6 access to the site.

Do we need it? No? Do us geeks want it for no reason? Yes :laugh:

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What happened to IPv5 ?

It got used for a stream protocol designed for A/V in the late 70s, never caught on but did use up the version number.

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"Do us geeks want it for no reason? Yes"

 

No not really - I personally would consider myself a ?ber Geek, and I actually use ipv6 on my home network in a testing/play mode -- and see no reason for neowin to go ipv6.  Every minute they would spend on that is one less minute they can spend on other things that make more sense.  Keeping the site running in tip top form for example..

 

Adding ipv6 would be just yet another thing that could go wrong that gets them what?

 

I have ipv6 available, which many people do not.  Both native and a tunnel - and I would not be connecting to neowin on ipv6 if they added it.  So who exactly would be using it?  Is it something they should be thinking about - sure ok, but it's years away before any actual work needs to be done.  Its a bit more complicated then just clicking a button ;)  Even if where they host the servers even has it as an option.

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"Do us geeks want it for no reason? Yes"

No not really - I personally would consider myself a ?ber Geek, and I actually use ipv6 on my home network in a testing/play mode -- and see no reason for neowin to go ipv6. Every minute they would spend on that is one less minute they can spend on other things that make more sense. Keeping the site running in tip top form for example..

Adding ipv6 would be just yet another thing that could go wrong that gets them what?

I have ipv6 available, which many people do not. Both native and a tunnel - and I would not be connecting to neowin on ipv6 if they added it. So who exactly would be using it? Is it something they should be thinking about - sure ok, but it's years away before any actual work needs to be done. Its a bit more complicated then just clicking a button ;) Even if where they host the servers even has it as an option.

I've been hearing about ipv6 since 2001, that ipv6 is the future but we are in 2014 and we still strong on ipv4... So it looks like we are still a long way to go before you see the migration to ipv6.
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^ yup, years away still..  Part of the problem is kind of chicken/egg issue..

 

Why have services on IPv6 when no users have IPv6, why enable users to have IPv6 when there are no services only on IPv6 ;)

 

It is going to be a slow process, #### still not even IPv6 on all the root server, and they started back in 2008 when 6 of them went online, but as you can see 5 of them still only IPv4

 

http://www.internic.net/domain/named.root

 

B,C,E and G only IPv4..

 

It is coming, but slowly -- yes if your in networking I would highly suggest you play with it and learn about it.  Just puts you ahead of the curve is all - I personally don't like some of the changes, and idea that everyone should get a /64 seems pretty freaking wasteful to me even if the address space just seems endless.. They thought the same thing with IPv4, and gave universities their own /8 -- wasteful wasteful use.. If they would of been less free with handing out ipv4 space we would have plenty left.. 

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Once it's available to us, we'll probably enable it, but at the moment, it's not, and I currently have no idea of when it will be.

IRC already supports ipv6 though ;)

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My previous ISP (AAISP) supported IPv6, but now I'm on BT Broadband they don't. Though I've heard it is planned to be enabled sometime this year.

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^ yup, years away still..  Part of the problem is kind of chicken/egg issue..

 

Why have services on IPv6 when no users have IPv6, why enable users to have IPv6 when there are no services only on IPv6 ;)

 

It is going to be a slow process, #### still not even IPv6 on all the root server, and they started back in 2008 when 6 of them went online, but as you can see 5 of them still only IPv4

 

http://www.internic.net/domain/named.root

 

B,C,E and G only IPv4..

 

It is coming, but slowly -- yes if your in networking I would highly suggest you play with it and learn about it.  Just puts you ahead of the curve is all - I personally don't like some of the changes, and idea that everyone should get a /64 seems pretty freaking wasteful to me even if the address space just seems endless.. They thought the same thing with IPv4, and gave universities their own /8 -- wasteful wasteful use.. If they would of been less free with handing out ipv4 space we would have plenty left.. 

They are doing the same mistake what they did with IPv4 with IPv6. Giving large swathes of addresses

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"Do us geeks want it for no reason? Yes"

 

No not really - I personally would consider myself a ?ber Geek, and I actually use ipv6 on my home network in a testing/play mode -- and see no reason for neowin to go ipv6.  Every minute they would spend on that is one less minute they can spend on other things that make more sense.  Keeping the site running in tip top form for example..

 

Adding ipv6 would be just yet another thing that could go wrong that gets them what?

 

I have ipv6 available, which many people do not.  Both native and a tunnel - and I would not be connecting to neowin on ipv6 if they added it.  So who exactly would be using it?  Is it something they should be thinking about - sure ok, but it's years away before any actual work needs to be done.  Its a bit more complicated then just clicking a button ;)  Even if where they host the servers even has it as an option.

Why would IPv6 go wrong?

 

First off, it's a standard - not merely a Windows standard, but a global standard.  (Windows has supported it out of the box since the famous XP Service Pack 2, and Linux has supported it since the 2.6 kernel series.  Android and iOS have always supported IPv6 - the major driver of IPv6 for a standard was, in fact, mobile devices, and especially in developing nations, not the developed world; the Asian nations were the the first to push IPv6 out on a national basis, with Japan and South Korea leading that push.)

 

Second, the holdup with IPv6 has been embedded devices with non-changeable firmware.  XB360/PS3/XB1/PS4 all support IPv6 explicitly - no idea about Nintendo.  (Still, that does mean the consoles of both the curent-generation and previous-generation are covered.)  Routers - I know of exactly zero consumer or prosumer routers that don't support IPv6 out of the box today.  It may be disabled by default, but the support is there.

 

Thirdly, you just, without meaning to, covered the last real issue with adding IPv6 - ISP support.  Larger ISPs support IPv6 now.  So do all the tier 1 and even most tier 2 global and regional peers   The issue is smaller ISPs and hosting services.  How high up is the host of Neowin on that chain?  How compatible is the software on which Neowin.net runs with IPv6 (the biggest software issue)?

 

On the user side, the biggest concern is non-support on the client end - if you are using any OS (even XP), that will be a non-issue unless you have a lower-tier ISP that doesn't support IPv6.  (Even then, as you point out, there ARE IPv6 tunnel services that are free to use, such as Hurricane Electric's tunnelbroker.com - which I myself used before I got native IPv6 via Comcast, my ISP.)

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They are doing the same mistake what they did with IPv4 with IPv6. Giving large swathes of addresses

That's because there is no mechanism to give small swathes - as was the initial case with IPv4.

 

However, unlike IPv4, the chances of even coming close to exhausting the swathes they are giving out are zero.

 

How many IP addresses are in a given swath that is given out for an individual today?

 

Such a super-swath is unmanageable, on an individual basis, by ANY software available today, regardless of price.

 

In short, not merely impractical, but flatly impossible.  It is beyond the capabilities of technology either current OR on the drawing board.

 

Further, unlike IPv4, IPv6 is itself expandable and extensible - it has the seeds of further expansion and extension contained within the protocol, and without requiring a complete rewrite.

 

However, we have to run out of room with IPv6 first - which I don't see happening as long as we are limited to just this planet.  (And that is even if you assign an IP address to every person, creature, and object on the planet entire, which is quite impractical.)

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They are doing the same mistake what they did with IPv4 with IPv6. Giving large swathes of addresses

"IPv6 uses a 128-bit address, allowing 2128, or approximately 3.4?1038 addresses, or more than 7.9?1028 times as many as IPv4, which uses 32-bit addresses. IPv4 allows only approximately 4.3 billion addresses." (Source; Wiki)

Everyone can have 1 million addresses, and there would be plenty left.

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"IPv6 uses a 128-bit address, allowing 2128, or approximately 3.4?1038 addresses, or more than 7.9?1028 times as many as IPv4, which uses 32-bit addresses. IPv4 allows only approximately 4.3 billion addresses." (Source; Wiki)

Everyone can have 1 million addresses, and there would be plenty left.

There is a nice grains of sand analogy that I've always heard: http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/4508/can-every-grain-of-sand-be-addressed-in-ipv6

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Originally ISPs were going to hand out /48 blocks to end users, but people worried about address exhaustion so it was changed to a /56 (That's what I've got, 4,722,366,482,869,645,213,696 addresses over 256 subnets) even then there's 72,057,594,037,927,936 possible /56s (Give or take, we're currently allocating out of a single IANA block, there's lots of blocks)

Anyway, unless you do static addressing you'll never see less than a /64 as a end user, you need that much for self assigned addresses. And that still gives us a 64bit network portion.

Why would IPv6 go wrong?

 

First off, it's a standard - not merely a Windows standard, but a global standard.  (Windows has supported it out of the box since the famous XP Service Pack 2, and Linux has supported it since the 2.6 kernel series.  Android and iOS have always supported IPv6 - the major driver of IPv6 for a standard was, in fact, mobile devices, and especially in developing nations, not the developed world; the Asian nations were the the first to push IPv6 out on a national basis, with Japan and South Korea leading that push.)

 

Second, the holdup with IPv6 has been embedded devices with non-changeable firmware.  XB360/PS3/XB1/PS4 all support IPv6 explicitly - no idea about Nintendo.  (Still, that does mean the consoles of both the curent-generation and previous-generation are covered.)  Routers - I know of exactly zero consumer or prosumer routers that don't support IPv6 out of the box today.  It may be disabled by default, but the support is there.

...

IPv6 support in XP sucks, it "works" but at a bare minimum. The 360/PS3/PS4 don't do IPv6 either.

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Hello,

"Do us geeks want it for no reason? Yes"

 

No not really - I personally would consider myself a ?ber Geek, and I actually use ipv6 on my home network in a testing/play mode -- and see no reason for neowin to go ipv6.  Every minute they would spend on that is one less minute they can spend on other things that make more sense.  Keeping the site running in tip top form for example..

 

Adding ipv6 would be just yet another thing that could go wrong that gets them what?

 

I have ipv6 available, which many people do not.  Both native and a tunnel - and I would not be connecting to neowin on ipv6 if they added it.  So who exactly would be using it?  Is it something they should be thinking about - sure ok, but it's years away before any actual work needs to be done.  Its a bit more complicated then just clicking a button ;)  Even if where they host the servers even has it as an option.

The statement wasnt to be taken literally; People would still go to Neowin.net so like you mentioned people would still use the ipv4 version of the site, instead of ipv6. I was just mentioning it that since it is a technology site, it should think about being on the latest of the latest. No only that but in the future, everything will very slowly make a transition to ipv6. We are YEARS away from that but still... 

 

Just puts you ahead of the curve is all

This is all I ment BudMan :) It would put Neowin "ahead of the curve". Like you mentioned noone would access it but, putting other important things before, it would be a good future Neowin so to speak.

 

 

Once it's available to us, we'll probably enable it, but at the moment, it's not, and I currently have no idea of when it will be.

IRC already supports ipv6 though ;)

And solved. Thank you DaveLegg.
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Everyone can have 1 million addresses, and there would be plenty left.

 

That is the thing - they are not giving everyone 1 million, they give everyone a /64 - they even use /64 for connections between routers, like with IPv4 where you would use a /30 or even the special case /31

 

They give you a /64 -- so that is 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 IP addresses..Quite a bit more.. What could I possibly do with that many addresses, and the plan is for me to use that for every network segment.. So for example - I have 3 currently where I have lan, wlan and dmz -- they would all get /64's and business would get a /48.  I can get a /48 right now if I want..  And if I was going to run ipv6 on my segments would I am expected do vs just subnet my /64 I already have which has more than enough IP address for multiple planets ;)

 

A /48 is 1,208,925,819,614,629,174,706,176  IP addresses ;)

 

It's not they are giving them out by the million, they are giving them out by the Quintillion, and you can have a Septillion if you want them..

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That is the thing - they are not giving everyone 1 million, they give everyone a /64 - they even use /64 for connections between routers, like with IPv4 where you would use a /30 or even the special case /31

 

They give you a /64 -- so that is 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 IP addresses..Quite a bit more.. What could I possibly do with that many addresses, and the plan is for me to use that for every network segment.. So for example - I have 3 currently where I have lan, wlan and dmz -- they would all get /64's and business would get a /48.  I can get a /48 right now if I want..  And if I was going to run ipv6 on my segments would I am expected do vs just subnet my /64 I already have which has more than enough IP address for multiple planets ;)

 

A /48 is 1,208,925,819,614,629,174,706,176  IP addresses ;)

 

It's not they are giving them out by the million, they are giving them out by the Quintillion, and you can have a Septillion if you want them..

And there is no router on the PLANET that can manage that many addresses on a per-IP basis.  None.  (I get a /48 from Comcast HSI - as does every single customer - and the chance of any customer running out of IPs if their router supports DHCPv6 - even if Comcast supplies the router - is exactly none.  I have SEEN the residential routers that Comcast currently supplies - all of them support DHCPv6, by the way, which did not used to be the case - the chance of DHCPv6 exhaustion is zero.  Even CISCO admits that their carrier-grade Catalyst routers are unable to fine-grain manage merely an entire /24 - the original smallest sub-block - let alone the /48 handed out to individuals today.)  You'll run out of bandwidth - in fact you'll run out of ROUTER, even if your router is carrier-grade - before you'll exhaust a /48.  (Cisco has their share of public white papers on their own IPv6 rollout - they make for VERY interesting reading.)

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You'll run out of bandwidth - in fact you'll run out of ROUTER, even if your router is carrier-grade - before you'll exhaust a /48.  (Cisco has their share of public white papers on their own IPv6 rollout - they make for VERY interesting reading.)

Just to clarify, you are saying you'll run out of memory to keep routing tables in, correct?

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Ehm, I've been doing almost all of my surfing over IPv6 whenever available for a few months now. While there's no real advantage it's nice to be on the cutting edge of technology.

 

It shouldn't be a lot of work to support IPv6 if your ISP/host has proper support for it, and there are no downsides to it. So then why not?

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who said anything about a router handling the addresses?  I have read the papers where they say /64 is not wasteful and makes sense, etc.  My point being when they started using ipv4 they thought it would be endless supply as well - hey here is a school that has 25k students with a handful of computers maybe.. Lets give them a /16 ;)

 

Can you name even 1 school that is actually using anywhere close to their /16 they own?  Companies have /8's -- Apple has 17/8, MIT (school with 11K total students) has 18/8.  Ford, ATT, Xerox all have /8's Those that do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it is all I am saying.  And while it might make it easier to use -- how does using a /64 with 18 quintillion address not wasteful for a point to point link ;)

 

Shoot MIT owns 18/8 and they are not even hosting their www.mit.edu site on that space ;)  You want to know why we ran out of ipv4, is because they wasted it..  Now while I don't think anyone alive today will have to worry about running out of ipv6 space..  Its the point that its a finite number no matter how large it is - handing out 18 quintillion addresses per household should of been thought out a bit more ;)

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who said anything about a router handling the addresses?  I have read the papers where they say /64 is not wasteful and makes sense, etc.  My point being when they started using ipv4 they thought it would be endless supply as well - hey here is a school that has 25k students with a handful of computers maybe.. Lets give them a /16 ;)

 

Can you name even 1 school that is actually using anywhere close to their /16 they own?  Companies have /8's -- Apple has 17/8, MIT (school with 11K total students) has 18/8.  Ford, ATT, Xerox all have /8's Those that do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it is all I am saying.  And while it might make it easier to use -- how does using a /64 with 18 quintillion address not wasteful for a point to point link ;)

 

Shoot MIT owns 18/8 and they are not even hosting their www.mit.edu site on that space ;)  You want to know why we ran out of ipv4, is because they wasted it..  Now while I don't think anyone alive today will have to worry about running out of ipv6 space..  Its the point that its a finite number no matter how large it is - handing out 18 quintillion addresses per household should of been thought out a bit more ;)

Even if you hand out 18 quintillion addresses per allocation, you are only reducing the space to 2^64 which is 18 quintillion addresses in itself (remember, powers are exponential in growth). Or to put it in perspective, wolfram alpha estimates that there are 10^20 grains of sand on the planet or somewhere between 2^66 to 2^67 grains. So the number of addresses is only a few orders of magnitude lower than that even if you hand out 18 quintillion at a time. Or for another analogy, we would have to give each person on earth ~2 billion /64 segments in order to run out (assuming 7 billion people on earth).

 

If I did the math right anyway...

 

EDIT: fixed a typo: 2^20 --> 10^20

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And there is no router on the PLANET that can manage that many addresses on a per-IP basis.  None.  (I get a /48 from Comcast HSI - as does every single customer - and the chance of any customer running out of IPs if their router supports DHCPv6 - even if Comcast supplies the router - is exactly none.  I have SEEN the residential routers that Comcast currently supplies - all of them support DHCPv6, by the way, which did not used to be the case - the chance of DHCPv6 exhaustion is zero.  Even CISCO admits that their carrier-grade Catalyst routers are unable to fine-grain manage merely an entire /24 - the original smallest sub-block - let alone the /48 handed out to individuals today.)  You'll run out of bandwidth - in fact you'll run out of ROUTER, even if your router is carrier-grade - before you'll exhaust a /48.  (Cisco has their share of public white papers on their own IPv6 rollout - they make for VERY interesting reading.)

What is "DHCPv6 exhaustion"?

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I seem to be the very rare case of someone having IPv6

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