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North American Network Operators Group Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical Re: OMB: IPv6 by June 2008
On 4-jul-2005, at 12:25, Andre Oppermann wrote: 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.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. 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. 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.Ain't this *the* problem??? If not even Joe OperatingSystemEngineer can understand it, what is John Doe at home supposed to do? (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. ThatI 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. 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.What fundamental address space problem? The fix for this has been on the IETF drawing boards for half a decade but somehow seems to stay there.I'd say we run out of AS numbers about a year before we run out of IPv4 addresses, whenever that is.
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