IPv6 enabled Christmas Tree | Hacker News Reader

IPv6 enabled Christmas Tree

ipv6tree.bitnet.be

111 pointsmiohtama31 comments

> As it turns out inviting the entire internet to ping my IP address might not be the best idea I ever had... Bandwidth is regularly maxing out at 300Mbit/s of incoming ICMPv6 traffic

Oh, boy. I'm impressed it's still working.

I very much suspect that a lot of those ping6 packets are ignored.

At 300 Mbit/s that would be around 400000 pings per second or less than 3 μs/flash. At that speed the camera would not register individual flashes.

If his connection is actually saturated, he's more likely being packeted by someone trying to have fun.

Playing music automatically once a page loads is not the best idea. Please avoid doing so when possible. Even in Christmas season.

Normally I would agree, but in this case it improved my experience.

It's part of the YT video, I believe.

I think I'll wait a few days when everyone forgets about this, so I can actually see the effects of my pings .. if it's still up.

I sent some yellow (f0:ff:0) pings, they definitely showed up.

The first IPv4 enabled Christmas tree made the front page of the New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/1993/12/25/business/cyberspace-is-loo...

And now I'm convinced we're off the rails and should just revert to being an agrarian society.

So that's like 16,581,375 IPv6 addresses right? How much would all of those cost?

You can get a /64 from many different providers for the cost of renting a single VPS from them...

IPv6 officially keeps the last 64 bits for the "host" part of the address, which means that unless you are abusing the protocol, each subnet gets at least 2^64 addresses. Current "best practice" is for consumer ISPs to give each end-user at least a /48, that is 2^16 = 65,536 possible subnets' worth or 2^80 total address. Your mileage is going to vary depending on your ISP though.

Edit: looks like the RFC has been updated to recommend smaller allocations where appropriate. Still keeps /64 as the smallest allowed subnet though. https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6177#page-4

Edit2: fixed devices -> subnets.

> each device gets 2^64 addresses

Each subnet gets 2^64 addresses. You can have multiple devices in the same subnet.

You can get several /48 and /64 IPv6 allocations from Hurricane Electics TunnelBroker for free.

Eagerly awaiting a writeup explaining how it was done. It seems to be an Arduino with a pair of shields, the lower one being an Ethernet shield and the upper one perhaps a protoboard shield?

finally an ipv6 killer feature!

can you provide some stats?

IPv6 keeps being a running joke. At least some people still have some sense of humour about it.

IPv6 is silently gaining a lot of steam lately. Akamai reports[1] close to 50% from comcast and att over ipv6, and 80% from verizon, 72% from t-mobile. Reliance Jio, a new mobile carrier in India is doing 47%.

[1] https://www.akamai.com/us/en/our-thinking/state-of-the-inter... (click 'networks')

Thanks, very interesting data set. Shocking to see India went from 1% Ipv6 to 22% in just a period of 6 months or so due to Reliance Network.

IPv6 needed to happen a decade ago. We have exhausted the IPv4 space. I feel IPv6 suffered from huge usability issues, although it can be worked around with good provisioning systems that automatically setup DNS entries.

We're going to get to the point where spinning up a VPS with an IPv4 address is going to get increasingly more and more expensive, unless we make some huge strides in moving to IPv6.

We need to 1) force owners of legacy /8s to give up on them, and 2) make sure all mobile ISPs worldwide and residential connections in developing countries have their customers behind a CGNAT

2) would also help a lot with the upcoming IoT security shitstorm

CGNAT prevents users from hosting personal services - its a PitA.

Yeah, I just discovered my ISP (WebPass) has exhausted their IPv4 allocation [1] and is transitioning residential customers to private IPv4 addresses, and I'm not really sure how to set up a VPN on IPv4 now. I guess I need to set up a tunnel over IPv6 somehow?

1. https://webpass.net/blog/ipv4-exhausted

I (hope to) see CGNAT as the stick - with v6 being the carrot that allows point-to-point apps and personal hosting to work reliably again.

That requires the ISP to offer v6, of course. I'm on Comcast which, say what you will about them, has been years ahead of everyone else for carrier-grade v6 support.

You do realize most of the legacy /8 owners are actively using them, right?

I'm sure Apple, Ford and the US postal service are all using all 16 million addresses. The fact is that most intra-network traffic doesn't need an IPv4 address since it'll be NAT'd anyways. So even if Apple has 16 million IoT devices around campus, it doesn't actually need 16 million addresses.

Fun fact, Stanford used to have an /8 but returned it since it wasn't using all it's addresses.

Forcing owners of legacy /8's to give them up is hugely cost prohibitive for them. Various orgs with their own /8's might not announce them, but use them extensively internally.

Also, it wouldn't really help stave off the amount of IP's required, and we'd still be out in months.

Each /8 only gives us about a month of runway. Not worth the bother.

RFC1833 "Internet Protocol, Version 6 (IPv6) Specification"[1] was published in Dec 1995, over 20 years ago. I think the transition took a lot longer than anyone anticipated, not least because so many people considered IPv4 was good enough to be getting on with.

Only after the IPv4 address exhaustion occurred did many people finally understand that IPv6 was a necessity and not just something they could avoid by deploying another layer of NAT.

The ISP I use was an early adopter of IPv6[2] and the first time I got an IPv6 address I remember wondering what all the fuss was about. For me as a consumer having an IPv6 address made almost no difference to my on-line experience. While that might sounds negative, it is actually a good thing, even several years ago IPv6 "just worked" for consumers.

Today we see many ISPs deploying IPv6 on consumer connections. The Google statistics[3] show just how rapid the growth of IPv6 has been in the past few years. If you zoom in you can see the positive spikes which occur at weekends. These show that home and mobile connections tend to have a higher IPv6 penetration than office networks.

1: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1883

2: http://aa.net.uk/kb-broadband-ipv6.html

3: https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html

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