IPv6 Ready Logo Program
ipv6ready.org
ipv6ready.org
I think an IPv6-compliance logo scheme would be a good idea, but it should be driven by major commercial vendors like Apple, Microsoft, Google etc on the software side, and supported by industry forums like the WiFi Alliance and the GSM Association on the hardware side. I would love to be able to ditch IPv4 entirely for running large production networks.
I think Apple have already started to enforce IPv6 support on iOS apps. It would also be interesting to audit open source projects for IPv6 support; just the presence of the appropriate API calls would probably be sufficient for a first hack to tell the difference between IPv6-compliant and non-IPv6 compliant applications. This would allow influential distros like Debian to start the process of deprecating old software which is incapable of working properly with modern networks.
My wife thinks the logo looks like a CAPTCHA!
And it's not even valid XHTML either, with <br> tags that aren't closed and missing closing tags every so often.
Gonna say, I miss this era of the internet. It had character and a soul we just don't see anymore.
Looks like something right out of MS WordArt from the 90s.
Old 2007 whitepaper: https://www.ipv6forum.com/dl/white/IPv6_Ready_Logo_White_Pap...
2005 paper on getting the logo cert for the Linux kernel: https://landley.net/kdocs/ols/2005/ols2005v2-pages-291-298.p...
If you look at the approved products page and sort by date, you'll see Samsung, IBM, Cisco, Intel, ZTE, Nokia and lots of other tech companies--software and hardware. So clearly they were involved early on.
https://www.worldipv6launch.org/ has better logos and corporate participation, though it's mostly a reference to the event on June 6 2012.
Are Cisco, Huawei, Dell, HPE (Aruba), SUSE, Oracle, Nokia, ZTE, Red Hat, Panduit, Supermicro, National Marine Electronics Association (NMEA), VMware, Samsung, Arista, Juniper, DataDirect Networks (DDN Lustre), Sophos, Tencent Cloud Computing, Apple, etc, not 'major organizations'?
Because they all have products on the IPv6 Ready Logo Program Approved List:
* https://www.ipv6ready.org/db/index.php/public/?o=4
> I think an IPv6-compliance logo scheme would be a good idea, but it should be driven by major commercial vendors like […]
Have you bothered to investigate what this program does actually does? Approval entails interoperability testing: the below Cisco against Arista and Juniper routers, and RHEL and Windows hosts.
* https://www.ipv6ready.org/db/index.php/public/logo/02-C-0027...
They submitted products earlier in October, and the above has just been approved as of today (2023/10/29).
The govt takes a stance that most vendors can't be trusted on their word so everything to be purchased must undergo a certification process to ensure that it meets the baseline requirements.
'This' being IPv6(-only) functionality.
"SUBJECT: Completing the Transition to Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPv6)"
* https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/M-21-0...
Just looking at the horrible logo mashed into the header that is 100% illegible because its like 50px wide is all you need to know.
EU has some financing rules, where in many cases, you cannot buy any equipment with public money if it doesn't support IPv6, and RIPE-554 (now 722 - https://www.ripe.net/publications/docs/ripe-772 ) was written just to avoid the "ipv6 ready" devices... so many tenders had a ripe 554/722 requirement written in back then (now it doesn't really matter, since most of equipment adequately supports ipv6, at least the stuff from "big vendors".
edit: yeah, right from the ripe772 : "While the Logo certification was devised around 20 years ago..."
This design can only be applied to equipments as a sticker as it is impossible to directly imprint into the mold.
Not only this increases the cost (negligible, I know), but for devices that are meant to be used for years, it will just degrade and won't be as visible.
IPv6 supports multiple methods of multi-homing.
> For example, couldn't they have extended port numbers to 128 or 256 bits and recommended that IP flows be identified just by the pair (source port, destination port) instead of the current (source IP, source port, destination IP, destination port)?
Port numbers aren't part of the IP layer. Regardless, IPv6 contains a 20 bit flow label (https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc6437) that can be used to indicate a specific (sub)connection. I don't think it's ever used, though.
> That would make it possible, for instance, to start a HTTP upload via an LTE modem but finish it on WiFi without interrupting the connection.
That's already technically possible, but not in the IP layer. Multi-path TCP solves this problem exactly how you would think, by agreeing on an identifier between two hosts and performing a handshake over an alternate route using that key. iOS uses it by default for various services. This can even be used to bundle the connection (upload over LTE and WiFi at the same time for maximum network speed) or theoretically to do weird stuff like upload over ethernet and download over WiFi.
Sadly, many Android devices still run old Linux kernels so MPTCP is disabled on there by default, though more recent devices should support it just fine. Many networked clients also don't use it, though I'm not sure why; it's just an option flag in TCP, if the network is fucked up by corporate middleboxes, the connection will just behave like a normal connection.
If you're ever writing a TCP server or client, consider enabling MPTCP by default!
How does one do that?
If you're using the C API on a Linux kernel, use IPPROTO_MPTCP instead of IPPROTO_TCP. With Go, call SetMultipathTCP(true) on listeners and other connections. On iOS, set MultipathServiceType to NSUrlSessionMultipathServiceType.Handover for your NSUrlSessionConfigurations.
Depending on your platform, you may need to do a quick "is MPTCP supported" check with fallbacks, i.e. when you need to support older Android, Windows, or BSDs, or an old (<5.6) Linux kernel.
I think that’s the chief reason it’s failed to catch on at any meaningful rate. It may be good overall or have long-term effects, but if any one typical use asked you, “what will be different for me if I buy this?” there’s no answer.
Lots of purely technical things which have no impact on user experience take over old technologies.
The issue with IPv6 is that it has no visible impact on users -_and_ it's a major paradigm shift in terms of complexity and addressing scheme compared to v4.
Every year I secretly hope some major consortium with traction release "IPv4 2.0" with 8 bytes and get done with it.
I think you mean "get started with it"? It's not easy to win against a competitor with a 25 year head start.
How exactly would this work?
IPv4 data structures have four bytes/octets (4B) for addresses. So how do you fit 8B of addresses in 4B structures? You don't. So you have to update every network element—host (desktop, laptop, mobile, embedded), router, switch, firewall—to have a new data structure (and maybe new function/system calls, as the old ones assume the old structures). So all devices have to have updated network stacks, including long-lived ones that sometimes are not touched for a decade+.
And not just pure networking code: anything that touches (e.g.) DNS as well, as A records are 4B-only as well, so you need a new record type and deploy new DNS server and resolver code everywhere.
But of course if you have a 4B-only network elements/devices, they cannot talk to 8B-only devices/services, so you have to create translation mechanisms because some devices may not yet have the update 8B-capable network stack. And sometimes an 8B network is an island in a sea of 4B, so you have to have tunneling. Of course some may have both 4B and 8B, and want to talk to something has also has 4B and 8B, so now you have to have code for source/destination selection.
Those are the exact same challenges as with the IPv6 roll-out.
And of course "IPv4 1.0" continues to work, so what motivation is there for going to your "2.0"—just like what motivation is/was there for going to IPv6 when IPv4 is/was 'working'?
See "TCP and UDP with Bigger Addresses (TUBA), A Simple Proposal for Internet Addressing and Routing" for part of the discussion from back in the day (1993):
The problem of adoption with IPv6 is not technical. It's that IPv6 changes radically how we thing about IP networks.
IPv6 explodes all existing concepts of DHCP, DNS, NAT, etc. You have an entire generation of network, system and software engineers that have no clue at how IPv6 work, no existing infrastructure to learn it, and somehow expect that it's going to stick.
I say, let's solve the 90% that is really problematic with IPv4, being the number of adresses, and the rest is moved to some other standard.
I never understood this line of thinking.
You put your Layer 4 bits into a Layer 3 packet with a larger address space, then stuff that into a Layer 2 frame, and send it off onto the wire/air waves.
You can have DHCP(v6) if you wish. DNS is only different with a new record type (AAAA). NAT-y stuff can still be done, but stateful firewalls are not different.
The fact that you can—if you wish—have less infrastructure (no DHCP server, no NAT (but still SPI)) should make it easier to deal with, not harder.
Look, I don't know what to tell you, honestly.
I tend to think I'm fairly more litterate in networking than most software engineers. I am no network engineer, but I have spent most of the last decade writing networking software, including layer 2 VPNs.
I am also genuinely interested in understanding new tech.
Yet, IPv6 _terrifies_ me.
Every 2 years or so I'm in the mood of learning it. And every time, after reading docs on the subject, I'm like "Nope, I'll wait til I retire to get my IPv6 PhD".
Maybe that's just a matter of finding a proper, accessible documentation. I always end up thinking "okay so that's a total big bang I have to rethink entirely everything I know about L3".
As an example, let's say your ISP gives you the details:
WAN IP: 2001:db8:ffff:200::2/64 (like "203.0.113.2/24")
Default router: 2001:db8:ffff:200::1 (like "203.0.113.1")
Routed prefix: 2001:db8:42::/48 (like "192.168.0.0/16")
ip addr add 2001:db8:ffff:200::2/64 dev wan0
ip route add default via 2001:db8:ffff:200::1
ip addr add 2001:db8:42:1::1/64 dev lan0 [like "192.168.1.1/24"]
interface lan0 {
AdvSendAdvert on;
prefix ::/64 { DeprecatePrefix on; };
RDNSS 2001:4860:4860::8888 { };
};
What am I glossing over? Most ISPs aren't static, which means you need to automate the above setup, and even for a static ISP you'd need to persist the `ip` commands (e.g. via /etc/network/interfaces or whatever your distro uses to do network config). If your ISP needs ppp or VLANs or whatever then you gotta deal with those too, but that's not v6-specific.
You're also going to want a firewall, but that will look very similar to your v4 one: deny new connections from the WAN, allow new connections from the LAN, allow packets from existing connections in both directions. I can give you ip6tables or ferm for that if you want.
Lastly, I'll point this out explicitly, but you don't need NAT which is why there's no mention of it above. It's just not necessary. The ISP has an inbound route set for 2001:db8:42::/48 to your router, and a /48 is more than enough address space.
Other than that, those three commands + radvd config really are enough for a fully-functioning network. It doesn't seem terrifying to me, nor does it seem inaccessible to someone that already knows how v4 networks work.
I’m not the parent but I just end up not wanting to have to debug network traffic across two protocols where I don’t know how to deterministically work out which is in use.
Then I need to work out new firewall rules and replacements for things like Pi-hole, home DNS, etc. Realistically that’s just me reading docs for 10 minutes, and double-checking everything has the “work with ipv6 box” toggled.
But personally my hesitation is getting stuck in this in between and maintaining two network setups.
Not terrifying, just a lot of work I don’t need to do.
But thank you. Now I’m inspired to do it.
But maybe that's really only relevant for routable static addresses and consumers typically don't need any. I understood e.g. T-Mobile US consumer subscriptions are IPv6 only already now. (Not living there, so from hearsay) It's just transparent to the customer via NAT64 where needed? And obviously all somewhat recent phones just work, so no logo required.
I'm a T-Mobile US customer. This is correct - the only real address your phone gets is IPv6. I believe V4-only sites are reachable using 464XLAT (RFC6877, RFC7335) or equivalent.
https://old.reddit.com/search?q=ipv6+forum
And nothing on HN.
Seems just as focused on cryptocurrency as is focused on IPv6
There are more extreme examples. For example, China is banning IPv4 for new networks at the end of this year: https://www.theregister.com/2021/07/26/china_single_stack_ip... In two years, certain sectors in China must be using IPv6 regardless of network age: https://brandergroup.net/2021/09/chinas-plan-to-begin-elimin...
Other countries aren't that strict in IPv6 enforcement, but it's only a matter of time before they will be.