Military Pressuring Vendors On IPv6 406
netbuzz writes "US military officials are threatening IT suppliers with the loss of military business if they don't use their own wares to start deploying IPv6 on their corporate networks and public-facing Web services immediately. 'We are pressing our vendors in any way we can,' says Ron Broersma, DREN Chief Engineer and a Network Security Manager for the Navy's Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command. 'We are competing one off against another. If they want to sell to us, we're asking them: Are you using IPv6 features in your own products on your corporate networks? Is your public Web site IPv6 enabled? We've been doing this to all of the vendors.'"
Re:How long will IPv6 last? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:How long will IPv6 last? (Score:4, Informative)
Though things aren't likely to exhaust any time soon, that's a fairly naive perspective on it.
2^121 addresses are knocked out by ULAs, 2^118 knocked out by link-local addressing, 2^120 are only available for multicast. In aggregate, a small chunk, but sizable.
Then, there is the inefficiency of distribution. Nothing smaller than /64 is ever supposed to be given to any single network segment. Currently, nothing smaller than a /48 is supposed to be given to an entity allowed to do routing (e.g. houses), though some have proposed allowing /56. Just like some places have 16.7 million IP addresses that don't need them, similar inefficient allocations will be made in IPv6 world.
In order to do a competent assessment, a more complex projection is required.
Re:How long will IPv6 last? (Score:5, Informative)
(Deep breath)
When we have colonised the entire observable Universe (at a (hugely over)estimated one habitable planet per star), our descendants* will be able to own about three-quarters of a million cellphones each.** [wolframalpha.com]
If you mean we should skip a step while we're at it, we are: we're going straight from 32-bit to 128-bit, rather than 64-bit.
* In before "this is Slashdot".
** 715,925 cellphones should be enough for anyone!
Re:I'll move to IPv6 (Score:5, Informative)
Newegg doesn't sell them, but the Apple Airport Express (and any 802.11n based Apple router) supports IPv6. $99 and up. Buffalo had one out in 2007, before their WiFi lawsuit, and has a few more out now. DLink does too.
http://www.sixxs.net/wiki/Routers [sixxs.net] has a good list.
It will be interesting to see what router manufacturers decide to be nice and offer IPv6 formware upgrades, and which ones push people towards new equipment.
Re:Too little, too late... (Score:4, Informative)
check your facts: http://www.google.com/ipv6 [google.com] it is native on Google...
Did you read all the way to the end? Where it says: "If your network meets these requirements and you'd like to receive Google over IPv6, please see our FAQ for how to request access."
In other words, it would be broken if enabled, and it's not enabled for everyone, unless access is explicitly requested by an ISP network administrator. I even tested this, take a look:
nslookup
> set type=AAAA
> www.google.com
Server: ####.#####.###
Address: 151.178.210.155
Non-authoritative answer:
Name: www.google.com
> ipv6.google.com
Server: ####.#####.###
Address: 151.178.210.155
Non-authoritative answer:
Name: ipv6.l.google.com
Address: 2404:6800:8004::68
Aliases: ipv6.google.com
In other words, the organisation that is likely the world's most competent "Internet host" in terms of pure technical skill had to develop a procedure to enable ISPs to dip their toe in the water and enable IPv6 access only if they're very very certain it won't break anything.
If that's the state of IPv6 adoption in 2010, mere months from IPv4 address space exhaustion, we're in big trouble.
And there is a quite active IPv6 forum in Australia, and AARNET is IPv6 for a long time...
Talk is cheap. There's no action, particularly in management.
Imagine if in late 1999, there would have been "active forums" for some techos to talking about "testing" the possibility of rolling out 4-digit dates just as soon as management approves it. Not too quickly though, because it might "break things". Meanwhile, the world's biggest banks have "experimental" 4-digit date support, if you open a new "test" account.
Re:How long will IPv6 last? (Score:5, Informative)
I'll try...
I have no idea of any meaningful measurement of Library of Congress for comparison, sorry.
It takes 39 digits to define the number of addresses in IPv6. Only 10 digits to define the number of addresses in IPv4.
If you treat each address as a unit of mass and consider IPv4 to have mass equivalent of 7 liters of water, then, IPv6 would have mass equivalent roughly to Earth. (The whole earth, including all the oceans, lakes, land masses, people, buildings, etc.)
In IPv4, there are more than 1.5 people alive today for every address.
In IPv6, there are 50,041,524,547,196,832,862,260,971,681 addresses for each person alive today.
Or, perhaps consider the following:
The US public debt is 13,848,000.000,000. If IP addresses were pennies, we would need 3,462 IPv4 internets to pay it off. The IPv6 address space, converted to pennies, OTOH, would pay the public debt more than 24,572,672,365,752,344,270,896,491 times. /64 network worth of pennies, please ;-)
(If anyone wants to send me even a single IPv6
email me for contact information.)
Hope that helps.
Re:How long will IPv6 last? (Score:5, Informative)
You try to design a router ASIC with variable length addresses!
You and I might struggle, but Tony Li [lightreading.com] didn't seem to have a problem with it. Really. Go and look at Google Groups for info.big-internet around 1993-1994 and see Tony provide pseudo-code that demonstrated that variable length was not a problem for ASICs, nor was it any slower.
Yes, it is obvious that fixed length must be better than variable length. Yes, that is incorrect. What everyone 'knows' may be far from the truth.
Now, continue surfing using the more efficient, cheaper ATM (fixed size cells) NIC rather than that inefficient , expensive Ethernet (variable size frames) NIC.
Re:Well (Score:3, Informative)
More likely the military loves IPv6 because it's by nature a lot more traceable -- it defaults to unique addresses for each host, and even contains routing information.
Granted, you can set up a fc::/7 network, and fake-NAT outgoing traffic, but even then your internal address is likely unique. When intelligence find a HD or USB key with an internal IP 192.168.0.15 in a log, it doesn't help when there are millions of networks out there with 192.168.0.0/255 networks, but if the address is fd17:192b:3fa7:0031::000f, there's a much better chance that it can be matched against a unique destination.