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 22:17 UTC (Thu) by lutchann (subscriber, #8872)
In reply to: Level Up to IPv6 with Ubuntu 10.10 on Comcast (Linux.com) by dlang
Parent article: Level Up to IPv6 with Ubuntu 10.10 on Comcast (Linux.com)

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.

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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.