FCC: The Countdown to IPv6 is On | Hacker News Reader

FCC: The Countdown to IPv6 is On

internetsociety.org

28 pointsdanyork13 comments

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Uh huh. Starting a year ago:

http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/submissions&q=IPv...

* Ask HN: Are you ready for IPv6?

* IPv6 is coming - just in time

* IPv6 is here

* World IPv6 Day: Solving the IP Address Chicken-and-Egg Challenge

* IPv6 - No longer optional

* Y2K-Like Crisis Predicted -- IPv4 Runs Out in 18 Months (ed: 2+ years ago)

* Martin Levy Discusses the Global Urgency to Deploy IPv6

* Only 2 years of IPv4 addresses left. Are you ready for IPv6? (ed: 3+ years ago)

It goes on and on like this.

The only IPv6 article you really need to read:

http://cr.yp.to/djbdns/ipv6mess.html

The FCC can say whatever it wants to. IANA can say whatever it wants to. RIPE can say whatever it wants to. The reality is: if we're facing the end of anything, it's of fiat IPv4 addressing, in which groups formerly consisting of greybeards but gradually transitioning to technocrats decide for the market what the best utilization of IPv4 addresses is. Fiat addressing will give way to market addressing, and things will continue to chug along --- presumably indefinitely.

At some point in the next year or two, enough browsers will support SNI, and the last major consumer-level coupling of web apps to IPv4 will be gone.

I would only comment that a LOT has changed since that article you reference was written 10 years ago! In the conclusion to that 2002 article, djb writes:

---- The way to make IPv6 addresses work is to teach every Internet computer how to talk to IPv6 addresses---not just as an option that the sysadmin might configure, but as something that's automatically enabled as part of regular software/hardware upgrades. ----

Today, most all operating system do speak IPv6 - and in many cases it is enabled by default. And there are plenty of IPv6-to-IPv4 gateways and other technologies so that you can, in fact, have an IPv6 network with access to IPv4 resources. We've come a LONG way. We still have a good way to go, but we're in a much better place than we were 10 years ago.

The most painful problem I see is sockaddr_in; a lot of socket code is written to assume that an IP address is a scalar integer.

Steps I used to setup a linode service to do IPv6 hosting:

(running apache, running passenger for ruby)

1) ifconfig to get my already assigned ipv6 address

2) Setup my DNS AAAA record to point to it (for both www and blank).

3) There is no step 3. I could see ipv6 from work and home with no extra work.

I used this extension to check for ipv6 status:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hfkjfjdafcickoihmm...

IPvFoo is much better (disclaimer: I wrote it).

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ecanpcehffngcegjma...

How is it better?

Here are the primary reasons why IPvFoo is better:

- It doesn't send every domain you visit to a third-party server.

- It shows whether you're actually using IPv6, not just whether a AAAA record exists.

- It shows you all the page elements, not just the top level.

- It's Free Software.

Oh, nice work! There really isn't much point in running an indicator if it's just doing a DNS lookup to _guess_ if you were using IPv6, it covers up mistakes too easily. So it's nice to see it done properly, and the way you show the protocols of additional hosts is really slick too.

The indicators all just being AAAA or not instead of IPv6 or not was my main complaint last time I tried what was available on Firefox, but your comment lead me to the Firefox clone of IPvFoo: IPvFox. Thanks!

Here's a little restartless FF addon that will tell you if the page is using IPv6: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/sixornot/

Reposting a dead post (thanks Aneth) because I have basically the same question:

I'm not familiar enough with the consequences of this change, however it seems likely such a major transition of a fundamental network layer could hardly occur as smoothly as expected. Perhaps someone knowledgeable can explain what the worst case scenario might be and whether this will be a thorn in our sides for the next 10 years. -----

The transition has already been a thorn in our sides for the past 10+ years.

At least now we'll get some of the benefits of IPv6 while we're fighting with it.

I'm seeing a "6to4" in the first hop when I try to tracert Facebook's IPv6 IP. It looks like Comcast has me covered until I can get an IPv6 router and modem.

I also saw a dead:beef.

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