Comments on: Time to try IPv6

By: Steve O'Hara-Smith

Steve O'Hara-Smith — Thu, 09 Jun 2011 15:43:51 +0000

One of the best reasons for IPv6 is that it’s getting hard to get a public static IP address at home, and even harder to get more than one.

Anyone who has ever tried to get VoIP services up and running from inside a NAT environment will attest that it’s a nightmarish task because of the port mapping that goes on through the NAT device. There are workarounds and they can often be made to work but it would be so much simpler just to have a routable address. For VoIP purposes a tunnel isn’t good enough, the extra latency is a problem so yes I nag my ISP and have been doing so for some time now, meanwhile I run a tunnel.

Many other things require ports opened for them (web servers, games consoles etc.) and as soon as there’s more than one in the network NAT and port forwarding isn’t enough. I don’t really want huge numbers of addresses at home, but more than one would make life a lot easier and IPv6 looks like the only way we can all have that. The sooner I can ditch IPv4 the happier I will be.

By: Winston Weinert

Winston Weinert — Thu, 09 Jun 2011 03:09:32 +0000

Hopefully our friend Corey and his employer will not miss out on any new major web services launched (or perhaps expanded). It will become tricky to get legacy addresses for all the servers that require an address to function as it was designed to.

By: Corey

Corey — Wed, 08 Jun 2011 23:53:22 +0000

@Zoey: Yes, I know we’re out of IPv4 addresses. But apparently my ISP has enough; they are in no apparent rush. I run a private net in my house, and we do similarly at work. Therefore, no rush for me or my employer. I know though that this attitude contributes to the chicken-and-egg problem that IPv6 faces, but man…if it’s my money, and it is going to cost a good bit of it to go to IPv6, and I don’t get more in return for that effort, I’m not going to jump all over it.

I did go out and do a little reading on it, and some of it kinda scares me. The irregular use of the bits in the address for all the special cases, the separation of address assignment from routing information…it just seems it could have been done more simply. Oh well, that ship has sailed I guess. I’ll just wait awhile longer, for the icebergs to melt, before I take a cruise.

By: Christian Sturm

Christian Sturm — Wed, 08 Jun 2011 19:45:11 +0000

There are also some other benefits.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv6#Comparison_to_IPv4

By: Justin Sherrill

Justin Sherrill — Wed, 08 Jun 2011 13:44:25 +0000

Falling isn’t so bad, it’s the sudden stop at the end that causes problems. Everything’s great when there’s still some IPv4 addresses left; it’s when that suddenly stops that there’s going to be abrupt issues.

It can be dealt with by private addressing and NAT, sure, but I don’t like being stuffed into a private network by my providers. I would lose the ability to have shiningsilence.com located where it is, for instance.

By: Zoey4Ever

Zoey4Ever — Wed, 08 Jun 2011 09:15:19 +0000

@Corey

You do know that the IANA address pool is fully depleted since jan 2011? You can’t build any new houses on the net anymore because there are no v4 street numbers left.

So I’m waiting for v6 only sites and I’m pretty sure this will come in the near future.

By: Corey

Corey — Wed, 08 Jun 2011 04:37:29 +0000

Why nag my ISP? My IPv4 still works fine. I mean, if you just want to play with it, then great, but unless you need a lot of externally-accessible IP addresses, where’s the benefit, the driver, for adoption?

I think a good number of people and companies are asking the same question, hence the need for “propaganda” events like World IPv6 Day :)

All that said, it’s good for OSes like Dragonfly to have IPv6 implementations, in case users do have a need.