Acolyte of the Butterfly
Posts: 105 from 2003/4/22
Quote:
jcmarcos wrote:
In which network do you live, that it's already using six-byte addresses? Does it coexist with regular ones?I 've never came across any IPv6 network.
Six-byte addresses? Sixteen-byte perhaps? IPv6 uses 128bit addresses.
Yes, it coexists with IPv4, it's just another protocol.
I first came in contact with IPv6 11-12 years ago at univ, today I work for the Norwegian National Reseach and Educational Network (an NREN, the Norwegian equivalent to Spanish http://www.rediris.es/), and here we've been running IPv6 in various levels of production since I started working here in 2002, and I've had native IPv6 at home for 5 years or so.
Sure, NAT has helped saving IPv4, since you can dump a whole lot of clients behind NAT routers (source port mapping). It's not equally simple to provide services from behind NAT routers though (target port mapping). The point now is that all NAT tricking has already been used and IPv4 addresses space is _still_ running out in _very_ near future.
We will probably see a market for IPv4 address blocks soon, but with the majority of customers and providers having equipment that is ready for IPv6, and IPv6 address blocks being free (gratis), how long do you think it will take them to figure out that replacing IPv4 with IPv6 is cheaper than messing around with IPv4? And how much time do you think people will spend with maintaining IPv4 along with IPv6 when IPv6 is reaching "critical mass"? I predict a few turbulent years ahead, and then IPv4 will more or less vanish, and only be used where there is other choice due to legacy software/hardware.
Anyways, my point is - with all major operating systems being ready, ISP customers using Windows, OSX, Linux, *BSD etc. most if not all home routers also being ready (heck, some have since years even put up IPv6 tunnels all on their own if no native IPv6 is found), there's very little that prevents ISP from just doing a switch if they feel like it.
Note also that it's not so complicated to NAT IPv4 only services for IPv6-only clients, since one can easily map all IPv4 addresses within an IPv6 prefix (this is done when using NAT64 and DNS-64).
On the other hand it's quite tricky to get IPv4-clients to reach IPv6-only services - there's is not way to map IPv6 addressed into IPv4 address space, there simply is no room for it, so the best you can hope for is a proxy server with lots of nameserver hackery attached.
So - the question about "IPv6 or not" can rapidly turn into a "to be online or not". Most alternative systems have played with IPv6 over the years,
Contiki on C64 for example, has had it for years. Haiku have people working on it. ReactOS have plans to switch IP-stack soonish and have IPv6 in the new one.
In Amiga land, the last time any developer seriously wrote anything about IPv6 was when Holger Kruse was still developing MiamiDx 10 years ago. And when one consider the pace of Amiga development, I see lots of problems - remember that all applications will need to be rebuildt to support IPv6 as well, it's _not_ just the IP stack that is needed, but the IP stack needs to come first.
[ Edited by kolla on 2010/12/1 23:36 ]
-- kolla
