Level Up to IPv6 with Ubuntu 10.10 on Comcast (Linux.com) [LWN.net]

Level Up to IPv6 with Ubuntu 10.10 on Comcast (Linux.com)

Posted Oct 21, 2010 9:03 UTC (Thu) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167)
In reply to: Level Up to IPv6 with Ubuntu 10.10 on Comcast (Linux.com) by neilbrown
Parent article: Level Up to IPv6 with Ubuntu 10.10 on Comcast (Linux.com)

Prediction: IPv4 addresses will become a tradeable commodity before IPv6 replaces much of the installed IPv4 base. Then we would find out what they are really worth! What would you pay per-month for an IPv4 address?

This element of the transition is sometimes called "regime change" because it involves a change in the RIR allocation regime. You are correct, in a limited sense, that you will be able to arrange to transfer addresses. RIRs will (for a fee) arrange to update the allocation records once exhaustion occurs. Obviously you would have to negotiate (perhaps in an open market, perhaps behind closed doors) for the other party to be willing to transfer their existing allocation.

However that will only be for large aggregatable blocks (maybe a /24 but quite likely larger) because otherwise they aren't routeable. Unlike IPv6, which has already been deployed on a wide scale in production, this "market of IP addresses" is untested. If your business depends on it then you are in a rather uncomfortable position, such a market may never actually emerge in production scale, or the price may be far higher than you anticipated (consider, the legal overhead alone of agreeing such a deal could make a /24 cost many thousands of dollars, while your competitors have obtained all their addresses for free)

It doesn't say anything sad about IPv6. Businessmen would like things to continue as they are, long after that ceases to make sense. That's a commercial reality whether you're installing asbestos home insulation, delivering goods by horse and cart or selling worthless securities. No conceivable protocol to fix the address exhaustion problem (nor "tweak" to the existing IPv4) could have done better than IPv6 has in this environment.

Everybody who actually cares already migrated to dual-stack. Whole businesses, entire systems. But they represent a tiny, informed, minority. Some people's experience will be that their ISP mysteriously goes out of business after introducing new "better" service (the carrier grade NAT you're so enthusiastic about) and losing all its well informed customers to an ISP still actually providing Internet service. Most countries now have at least one home ISP that already provides native IPv6 (a step up from what Comcast are currently doing) and those companies know they're well placed to eat the other guys' breakfast.

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Level Up to IPv6 with Ubuntu 10.10 on Comcast (Linux.com)

Posted Oct 21, 2010 21:04 UTC (Thu) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link] (8 responses)

You're hoping that the client-only Internet doesn't come to pass where the most common type if "Internet" access is http only behind a carrier nat. It might be that even small business will het client-only Internet service with included cloud hosted apps as the default. The only way to get service like one has now with routable addresses would be to get an OC3 trenched to your home or equivalent medium to large business service.

At least it could work out that way, that's not an unreasonable prediction

Level Up to IPv6 with Ubuntu 10.10 on Comcast (Linux.com)

Posted Oct 21, 2010 21:43 UTC (Thu) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (7 responses)

leaving out your scare words aobut needing an OC3 trenched to your house, the rest of what you are talking about really is reasonable.

for myself, I want static IPs, no filters, etc. I willingly pay more to an ISP that provides this cleanly to me than I would pay for equivalent bandwidth from one that doesn't.

with the number of small/home businesses around, you aren't going to see this sort of home 'business' service start requiring any special line types, they will have different costs, just like they do today.

there are a lot of people who really do want 'outbound-only Internet'. I have relatives that I would be happy to see with this sort of line.

for these people things like DHCP, NAT, firewalling, spam filtering, content filtering, etc are all good things (or at least no pain for the user) for the ISP to provide.

these people would also be happy with IPv6 addresses that got NATed/proxied to IPv4 addresses by the ISP before they hit the 'real' Internet.

there are two things that these people may want that will take more work from the ISP

1. bittorrent downloads

2. online gaming (although most of this is already tolerant of such networks)

If the IPv6 people were not so utterly opposed to NAT, they would have a way for someone to use IPv6 locally and NAT out through a IPV6 -> IPv4 gateway to the IPv4 Internet. If this was available, you would see it start getting used by the ISPs at the edges of the network, and over time the NAT devices would move closer to the center.

But the IPv6 people are so anti-NAT that they won't even consider something like this, their 'transition plan' boils down to 'this is such neat technology that everyone will switch, even if it breaks everything they already have'

Level Up to IPv6 with Ubuntu 10.10 on Comcast (Linux.com)

Posted Oct 21, 2010 22:17 UTC (Thu) by lutchann (subscriber, #8872) [Link] (5 responses)

there are a lot of people who really do want 'outbound-only Internet'. [...] these people would also be happy with IPv6 addresses that got NATed/proxied to IPv4 addresses by the ISP before they hit the 'real' Internet.

No, they wouldn't be happy. They want to keep using their Windows 98 laptop with their ancient home router, neither of which will ever have IPv6 support.

If the IPv6 people were not so utterly opposed to NAT, they would have a way for someone to use IPv6 locally and NAT out through a IPV6 -> IPv4 gateway to the IPv4 Internet.

NAT64 is about to be standardized by the IETF, and a number of providers, especially mobile phone companies, have already committed to using it. It doesn't really help ISPs whose customers want to continue using IPv4-only devices, though.

Level Up to IPv6 with Ubuntu 10.10 on Comcast (Linux.com)

Posted Oct 21, 2010 23:35 UTC (Thu) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (4 responses)

they could continue to use their Win95 machine, but they would need to upgrade their router (the router would need to do IPv4 -> IPv6 NAT

I'm glad to see the NAT64 proposal, it's long overdue.

the silly thing about all of this is that IPv6 allocated a tiny slice of it's address space to include all the IPv4 addresses. This is a very straightforward mapping of conventional NAT processes, it's too bad that it's taking this long to get approved.

do you know if there is any software implementing this yet?

Level Up to IPv6 with Ubuntu 10.10 on Comcast (Linux.com)

Posted Oct 22, 2010 0:43 UTC (Fri) by lutchann (subscriber, #8872) [Link] (3 responses)

There's this:

http://ecdysis.viagenie.ca/

It looks a little rough around the edges though.

Level Up to IPv6 with Ubuntu 10.10 on Comcast (Linux.com)

Posted Oct 22, 2010 0:59 UTC (Fri) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (2 responses)

I'm also concerned that what they are working with is so old

bind 9.6-p1 when the current is 9.7.2-p2, fedora 10-12 (14 will be current in a couple of days, at which point 12 hits EOL)

all of this stuff is at least a year old at this point. I would have hoped that this sort of functionality would be getting upstream at this point.

the IETF draft document is set to expire in Jan 2011, so if it's going to become a standard instead of just fading away it's rapidly running out of time.

Level Up to IPv6 with Ubuntu 10.10 on Comcast (Linux.com)

Posted Oct 22, 2010 1:23 UTC (Fri) by lutchann (subscriber, #8872) [Link] (1 responses)

It's not meant to be production-quality software. Real deployments use proprietary implementations like the A10 Networks stuff. I haven't really seen anybody want to run NAT64 outside the carrier world.

The NAT64 draft cleared last call in August and is in the RFC Editor queue waiting on some related drafts to be done before it's published as an RFC.

Level Up to IPv6 with Ubuntu 10.10 on Comcast (Linux.com)

Posted Oct 22, 2010 5:07 UTC (Fri) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link]

with something like like this I would expect that a lot of people would want to use it in small settings, simply for the bragging rights :-)

if something like this were to be added upstream (into linux, BSD, and the two nameserveer packages) you would see this capibility in everything in a relativly short time. It would be trivial to add it to most small routers for example.

If they really are taking the attitude that only large ISPs would care about this and they will buy specialized equipment from Cisco to do this, then they are really missing the boat.

Level Up to IPv6 with Ubuntu 10.10 on Comcast (Linux.com)

Posted Oct 26, 2010 8:03 UTC (Tue) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link]

> there are two things that these people may want that will take more work from the ISP

... for now.

> 1. bittorrent downloads
> 2. online gaming (although most of this is already tolerant of such networks)

+ VoIP, + any present and future peer to peer application (aka: the "real" internet).