On Tue, Mar 16, 2010 at 01:17:30AM -0500, Mike Horwath wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 15, 2010 at 08:17:25PM -0500, Matthew Dixon Cowles wrote:
> > It seems that various people who aren't particularly alarmists
> > predict that the IPV4 address space will be exhausted some time next
> > year.
> >
> > I'd be curious to know what people are doing about IPV6. And, indeed,
> > what anyone can do given what appears to be a complete lack of
> > IPV6-capable CPE.
>
> Doug has been telling me for > 10 years that IPv6 is right around the
> corner...
But you use IPv6 all the time and most likely don't realize it. :)
(In the form of ScreenSharing which uses IPv6 internally for many items.
Rather than the original Hamachi VPN which used 5/8 without any
forthought about stealing it).
I think the only way people are going to fully support IPv6 is when
they have to be dragged into it. Current projection for IPv4
exhaustion is 18 months. (ie. they've allocated ~50 /8's in the last 4
years, but there's only ~20 left even after reusing things that IANA
typically reserved).
ISPs are going to squeal if the only way they can get customers online
is through ISP-wide NAT (I can't imagine that this doesn't hinder alot
of the bandwidth for the AT&T 3G data network).
But yet, of all the Tier-1 uplinks we've had/dealt with, none of them
provide native IPv6 into the TwinCities yet. I do know of one (I
wouldn't consider Tier-1) that does that we most likely would never
use. I'm currently getting TWTC to do it, but it was a special case
and process going on 4 months so far. Then we can switch out of the
tunnel to the EastCoast that we have currently. I also can't get IPv6
glue records into our domain registrar partner (although it may work
if doing it by hand through a support ticket). Let alone DNSsec signed
roots that is also coming down the pipe fairly quickly.
And only after a large ISP can't get more IPv4 blocks and have to
deploy IPv6 to customers, will they demand cheap CPE that can talk
IPv6 from the CPE vendors. Its really only the mass market CPE that
ISPs would hand out that needs updating. Most gear that corporate IT
level would go buy on their own does support IPv6 in some form or the
other. Ie. Apple Airports, Cisco routers, Cisco/Juniper/Fortigate
Firewalls, etc. all support it. You could do PPPoE mode with them
through the DSL CPE being dumb to support it.
Unfortunatly, we've already seen that real-world standards aren't
drawn up until there's a real need. We do IPv6 native now, but its all
staticly configured and some of the IPv4 stuff that we take for
granted doesn't exist in the IPv6 world. Up until now its been mostly
academic excercises for the stock operational IPv6 networking. Again
only now that things look close are there things being studied for
behavior of how IPv6 CPE should really behave on access links ie.
http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-ietf-radext-ipv6-access-00.txt
http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-huang-ipv6cp-options-00.txt
http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-ietf-v6ops-ipv6-cpe-router-04.txt
Still all drafts and working on basics of things like RADIUS and how
IPv6 CPE should behave, which is going to be different than how IPv4
CPE behaves, not RFCs yet. :( What was done 10 years ago is pretty
much chucked out after not being workable. :(
But yet, we're probably set for a bit on what we need in IPv4
space. But we aren't trying to fit on 10 million smart phones and
other devices that suddenly all need IP addresses for each one. Or
having to support set-top boxes, video games, etc. etc. all needing IPs too.
--
Doug McIntyre <[log in to unmask]>
-- ipHouse/Goldengate/Bitstream/ProNS --
Network Engineer/Provisioning/Jack of all Trades
