100 days of IPv4 left | Hacker News Reader

100 days of IPv4 left

infoq.com

12 pointsGarbage13 comments

I dunno about anyone else but this actually concerns me a little, its gunna be a significant amount of years before even half the internet is over to IPv6.

Blah blah blah, the x thousandth article about how there will be no more IPv4 addresses in x days.

Once upon a time, useless comments like the parent and this would be downvoted.

> The key problem has been in the delayed roll out of IPv6 to end customers, or for xDSL modems to be able to support IPv6 (most of which only support IPv4).

The real key problem has always been that there's almost nothing to do in IPv6 space. I've got IPv6 connectivity (via 6to4 and HE tunnel broker) for more than two years. All I remember is watching that dancing turtle, visiting Google search over IPv6 (once or twice, maybe, because typing "ipv6.google.com" is inconvenient and pointless), read Python docs and updated various GNU/Linux distros from IPv6-capable mirrors. Oh, the only really useful thing is the ability to directly ssh/scp into any computer at my home without constructing additional tunnels to overcome limitation of having a single globally-routable IPv4 address per 6 devices.

It's not like most ISPs can provide IPv6 support easily, but even those who can see no point in doing so. NAT64+DNS64 is resourcewise worse than classic IPv4 NAT. Some (lots?) of clients will experience all sorts of strange client-side bugs with IPv6-only connectivity. And, more important, there're almost nothing to do in IPv6 Internet today.

I believe when hosting providers will start giving IPv6 blocks to every and each customer, ISPs will follow. Not the other way.

> unlike IPv4, each network card can have many IPv6 addresses assigned to it (including loopback) at one time.

IPv4 has no problem with multiple network addresses assigned to one adapter, I do it all the time in both Windows and Linux.

> IPv4 addresses can be written as 0000:0000:0000:0000:0000:0000:63.246.7.184. (This also helps demonstrate the massive increase in numbers that IPv6 brings over IPv4).

Please, someone, make them stop telling that bullshit.

Only the first half of IPv6 address contains routing information. Okay, some routers may accept even /128 routes, but that's non-standard and one should not depend on that — the subnet is always /64.

So, the proper address space increase comparsion should be: 0000:0000:0000:0001:: vs 0.0.0.1, i.e. 2^64 vs 2^32.

Is there anything I can do to hasten IPv6, either as a guy who builds and runs website, or as a plain-old user? Or is it just a matter of waiting for the ISPs to roll it out?

I've been wondering this for a while - I can't seem to think of anything that's possible for the 'little guys' to do. This seems to be a massive infrastructure problem. The big guys have been sitting on the sidelines too long on this one. :/

Does anyone know of any hosting companies that offer IPv6 support? I have some clients on linode, but they don't support it either (http://www.linode.com/wiki/index.php/IPv6 - "Linode does not have native IPv6 yet.")

Linode doesn't have native IPv6, but I set up a Hurricane Electric tunnel, and the tunnel endpoint is less than 2ms from my Linode VM.

I believe prgmr have IPv6 - run by a fellow HNer (lsc).

There should be a rule that every server can only have one ip address at most. Then introduce a new version of ssl which also works with a non dedicated ip. This would release millions of ip addreses.

I'm resisting the urge to simply mock you here.

What you are suggesting is technically infeasible, and does not address the issue in any manner of significance. Congratulations, you liberated a few million IPs and delayed the IPv6 migration by a few days. Actually, since you freed individual IPs instead of entire blocks, you really didn't delay the migration at all but I thought I would be generous.

I don't have any clever or pithy quotes about this, so I'll have to wing it: If you have no expertise in the problem area, and you think you've come up with a simple solution that all the experts somehow missed, then you should probably assume you don't understand the problem and are wrong.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Name_Indication

Of course, as has been pointed out already, even if all SSL hosting servers with one IP per certificate consolidated their certificates, it wouldn't help much because network routing relies on routing tables not being too big, so it is only useful if entire blocks can shared.

I'd say that deploying IPv6 widely will actually be easier than trying to salvage allocated IPv4 address blocks.

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