World IPv6 Launch | Hacker News Reader

World IPv6 Launch

googleblog.blogspot.co.uk

64 pointsdazbradbury23 comments

I just purchased a new Comcast internet connection two weeks ago, leased their default router, have a vanilla MacBook Air.

I'm happy to report that I was required to do precisely and absolutely nothing - beyond spending a few minutes unpacking the (largish) cardboard box they shipped me, plugging in a coax cable to the router, ethernet cable to my USB dongle, and then activating my account.

15 Minutes later I was online. I've got 2001:558:6045:ba:24b2:f727:e418:328f/128, and I haven't found an IPv6 network/host that I can't route to natively, though I'm sure they are out there.

Zero effort and, if I wasn't paying close attention, it wouldn't be clear to me which services are communicating to me over IPv6 verus IPv4.

It Just Works.

Looking forward to World IPv6 Launch day on 6/6.

Does that IPv6 address change? I know Comcast changes your IPv4 address periodically unless you pay for a static one.

Amusingly even if the Comcast LAN prefix is static most operating systems by default will cycle your address anyways. In IPv6 a dynamic address is now a Feature!

Whether or not the Comcast LAN prefix changes is a good question though. I've seen no evidence that they plan to deliberately change them. My Comcast IPv4 address stays static pretty much until I reset my modem and even then it often grabs the same v4 address again.

I did a bit of really basic testing earlier today and no amount of modem resetting seems to cycle the IPv6 prefix I am getting delegated.

In the end though, dynamic DNS does a very good job of dealing with the occasionally changing prefix and IPv6 gets rid of the need to do port forwarding so maintaining dns records with public addresses to machines on your home network is actually possible now. I am happy to report that (with the proper firewalls in place) it is downright awesome to have IPv6 at home and at work and on your phone. I can't wait to see what sort of new home cloud tech this will enable.

Well if Comcast only assigns you a /128 then you're kinda stuck :) Good to know, thank you.

comcast assigns a /64 if you plug in a router that supports DHCPv6. You get a /128 if you plug your macbook air straight into the modem. =)

I will have to experiment with this. I can't get a Comcast rep to explain how a static IPv4 address (which doesn't use DHCP) plays with IPv6 access :)

On the topic of Comcast's ipv6 capabilities, does anyone know if DD-WRT will work with getting native ipv6?

Yes, it is capable of doing Native IPv6. However, pay attention to it: the version I grabbed a few months ago did not come with ip6tables or their corresponding kernel modules. You do not want your printer visible to the whole internet.

Yeah, I played around with it some more last night and apparently Comcast uses DHCPv6 the dd-wrt build I'm running (v24 SP2, whichever build is recommended for the Linksys E2000) only has Radvd. In addition, my modem (SB5101) only has IPV4 so oh well. I'll just have to wait.

> Looking forward to World IPv6 Launch day on 6/6.

It's already here! W6L occurred at midnight UTC, which was prior to your post.

I'm in almost the exact same position, except that I didn't know I had v6 access until I happened to think of the IPv6 launch sometime last week, wondered if I was online with it yet, and tried it by enabling it on the AirPort base station. It works perfectly: no glitches, as fast as v4, gets v4, v4/v6, and v6 sites perfectly. It does, as you say, just work.

Props to Comcast for putting the future of the internet into their customers' hands.

Here's a little restartless Firefox addon that tells you if the page is loaded over IPv6: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/sixornot/ and one for Chrome (written by p1mrx here): https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ecanpcehffngcegjma...

Actually, IPvFOX (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ipvfox/) is even better. Sixornot only shows dns lookups for the page's domain, this one shows IP address for every loaded resource in it.

If you click SixOrNot's down-arrow, it shows the same information, right?

Not really, at least according to description text of IPvFOX addon. And I remember that sixornot's verdict over a loaded page hasn't always been correct in the past - lot of sites have v6 DNS entries, but aren't really connectable, etc.

Ah... yeah, okay, I really should update that. SixOrNot used to be DNS only, but now it monitors connections too.

There's also 4or6, which has easy access to the IPv6-related preferences.

My ISP still hasn't deployed it, but I have a he tunnel, which works quite nicely. If nothing else, it's nice to be able to easily run several webservers with SSL on the same machine without feeling like an address hog.

Can someone shed light on how privacy will be affected by IPv6?

From what I've read, the typical case is that the ISP assigns statically a 64 bit prefix to the user, and the remaining bits are assigned from the MAC address of the devices, or a more opaque scheme when IPv6 privacy extensions are enabled. But doesn't this leave the user fully traceable based on the prefix only?

Compared to cookies for example, IP addresses are a serious threat to privacy/anonymity because they are logged everywhere, sometimes exposed (e.g. Wikipedia anonymous edits) and basically constitute a universal ID that can be used to make links between all kinds of network activities (web, BitTorrent, Skype, whatever...)

within the specification for privacy extensions is the option to change addresses periodically.

But that won't change your prefix will it?

no, but the issue is essentially the same as ipv4 at that point

Exactly, and my point is that currently my ISP assigns IPv4 addresses dynamically, so I'll get a different one every time I turn on my ADSL modem. I think this is quite common, and as a consequence IPv4 addresses are not a reliable way of identifying a home computer. If every home connection is assigned a static IPv6 prefix, that becomes a reliable identifier. Then you can credibly say "This comment on my blog is from the same computer as this Wikipedia edit from last month!", something you currently cannot say for home computers in general (while work computers are much more likely to have static IPv4 addresses and in that case IPv6 doesn't make it worse).

As I understand it, the privacy extensions in IPv6 were designed to solve another, bigger privacy concern that was totally absent from IPv4: if the second part of the IP address is based on the MAC address, then smartphones and laptops can be traced globally, no matter where they connect to the network (home, hotel room, 3G...)

ipv 6 launch, on the 6th day of the 6th month.

666

Yes, the nerds are still in charge of the net. Thank satan.

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