OMB: IPv6 by June 2008

Mon Jul 4 18:19:22 UTC 2005

On 4-jul-2005, at 12:25, Andre Oppermann wrote:

> I don't care what you see at RIPE meetings.  You have to look at how
> many servers/services are reachable via IPv6.  Nothing else.  Sure,
> many European ISPs have got their IPv6 prefix and some even announce
> it via BGP, but actually using it for anything more useful than "hey,
> I can ping6 you!" is far off.

Well, a reasonable number of people are doing more than that. Of  
course I realize that the numbers that I'm about to list here can be  
interpreted in any number of ways, however, the trend is very clear:  
IPv6 is on the rise.

Once in a while when I have nothing to do I load up the Amsterdam  
Internet Exchange membership list and visit all the web sites from  
the members, while keeping an eye on tcpdump. This tells me how many  
of those member's web sites are reachable over IPv6. The latest  
numbers I have are for march 2005. At that time, 9 or 213 members had  
IPv6-enabled web sites. About a year earlier this was 4 or 5 (one had  
AAAA but was unreachable), no information on the then current number  
of members.

>>     IPv6 has its problems, yes.  There are implementation issues  
>> that confuse programmers at Sun working on Solaris, and confuse  
>> network application programmers with a hell of a lot of experience  
>> under their belt.  If you can't talk directly to Jinmei himself,  
>> you're likely to be well and truly screwed.

> Ain't this *the* problem???  If not even Joe OperatingSystemEngineer
> can understand it, what is John Doe at home supposed to do?

The trouble is that different OSes have different ideas about how you  
should deal with IPv4+IPv6 coexistance on the socket API level. This  
is a big headache for the unfortunate souls who have to deal with it,  
but it's of no consequence at all to users.

(If you write for one OS or one IP version or use a higher level API  
you won't have problems, though.)

> You know, there is one thing Steve Jobs / Apple is getting right.   
> That
> is getting out of the way and make *functionality* available to the  
> average
> user.

I agree completely. All hail The Steve for giving us IPv6 on by  
default since MacOS 10.2! As of 10.4 the Safari browser handles IPv6  
the way it should too, like iTunes and Apple's Mail have for ages  
(although there is a nasty bug in the 10.4 Mail that required me to  
go back to talking to my mail server over IPv4).

>>     But just because IPv6 has problems doesn't mean that it  
>> doesn't solve the fundamental address space problem in IPv4, and  
>> doesn't mean that it is anything less than the best available  
>> alternative.

> What fundamental address space problem?

6 billion people with more under way with 3.7 billion usable  
addresses (how many do YOU use?) looks like a fundamental, long term  
problem to me.

> I'd say we run out of AS numbers
> about a year before we run out of IPv4 addresses, whenever that is.

The fix for this has been on the IETF drawing boards for half a  
decade but somehow seems to stay there.