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The Internet

Free IPv6 Subnets Are Going Away 182

Posted by timothy from the for-a-glorious-tomorrow dept.
ar32h writes "The 6bone is going to be phased out soon. This means all of us who have IP addresses or subnets beginning with 3ffe from tunnel brokers like Freenet6 are going to be sorry out of luck." According to the linked phaseout plan, "It is anticipated that under this phaseout plan the 6bone will cease to operate by July 1, 2006, with all 6bone prefixes fully reclaimed by the IANA," but there are a number of sub-deadlines along the way.
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Free IPv6 Subnets Are Going Away More

Free IPv6 Subnets Are Going Away

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  • haha (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    sucks to be the people that use freenet! ha ha. . . oh wait.. that includes me. SHIT! =(

  • Free IPv6 Subnets Are Going Away (Score:4, Funny)

    by Beliskner ( 566513 ) on Saturday March 29, 2003 @07:46PM (#5624057) Homepage
    Yeaahhhhhhh, the unstoppable march forward of technology, first the linux 2.4 kernel then this!

    Oh wait...

  • Does anyone use 3ffe::/96 any more? (Score:3, Informative)

    by c_g_hills ( 110430 ) <chaz AT chaz6 DOT com> on Saturday March 29, 2003 @07:47PM (#5624058) Homepage Journal
    I used a 3ffe prefix a few years ago to get acquainted with IPv6. These days, my JANET provided tunnel serves me well. Performance to a lot of 6bone networks has been deteriorating with all the free subnets they have been allocating.

  • 2003? what about NOW? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by RobertTaylor ( 444958 ) <roberttaylor1234 AT gmail DOT com> on Saturday March 29, 2003 @07:48PM (#5624062) Homepage Journal
    "...by July 1, 2006, with all 6bone prefixes fully reclaimed by the IANA," but there are a number of sub-deadlines along the way."

    would it not be more useful to name the closest deadline, not one three years away!?

    mmmm pissed @ boathouse chester.
  • Strikes me that IPv6 was about to make some progress amongst the early adopters (ie unix/linux users - or at least me) and now it's gonna cost, so what's the point?

  • a bit like ICANN (Score:5, Funny)

    by more fool you ( 549433 ) on Saturday March 29, 2003 @07:50PM (#5624069) Journal
    the IANA giveth, the IANA taketh away. Are they running out of addresses already?
  • The closing of the 6bone is a step backward, but the claiming of the address space maybe a step forward in a large scale implementation of ipv6. Till then I am still going to run my experimantal private backbone on ipv6 even if IANNA wants it or not, or care for that matter. :)

    • Re:step forward or backward (Score:5, Informative)

      by rabidcow ( 209019 ) on Saturday March 29, 2003 @08:20PM (#5624158) Homepage
      refer to RFC 2471 [faqs.org], which established the current address allocation: "These addresses are temporary and will be reclaimed in the future."

      And why are they closing the 6bone? "As IPv6 is beginning its production deployment it is appropriate to plan for the phaseout of the 6bone."

      They're just cleaning up from the testing phase so they can move into official use. It's only a step backwards if you consider the end of a beta test a step backwards.
      • It's only a step backwards if you consider the end of a beta test a step backwards.

        If you can go from IPv6 tunneled over IPv4 to a pure IPv6 network, it is a step forwards. But if you are loosing your only way to get IPv6 access and are forced to go back to IPv4 it is a step backwards. Do you believe IPv6 will be widespread enough by the time they start closing the temporary solutions?

        • Re:step forward or backward (Score:4, Interesting)

          by amorsen ( 7485 ) <benny+slashdot@amorsen.dk> on Saturday March 29, 2003 @10:48PM (#5624515)
          If you happen to have at one IPv4 address, you are automatically allocated a /48 subnet on IPv6 with 6to4. For free. Good luck trying to run out of addresses (for the non-initiated, a /48 contains 2^80 addresses).

          This article is unnecessarily alarming, but then again, who would bother reading an article with this headline: "6bone users have to change addresses in three years"?.

        • Do you believe IPv6 will be widespread enough by the time they start closing the temporary solutions?

          I seriously doubt it. It's a chickend and egg problem. Most companies are avoiding upgrades, patches, and service packs on just about everything. And you expect them to suddenly embrace IPv6 for no reason (what can they do that IPv4 can't do?)? Will there be anyone who will be running reachable only via IPv6? Well, a few geek sites will be there, but nothing for real world business and the average co

  • Ah, allright... I just hope I moved by then. I hope my tunnel broker does too.

  • 6bone has been replaced by 6to4 (Score:5, Informative)

    by Wesley Felter ( 138342 ) <wesley@felter.org> on Saturday March 29, 2003 @07:52PM (#5624075) Homepage
    You can get free IPv6 subnets using the much more efficient 6to4. 6bone isn't needed any more; that's why it's being phased out.

    • Re:6bone has been replaced by 6to4 (Score:5, Informative)

      by Michael Hunt ( 585391 ) on Saturday March 29, 2003 @10:15PM (#5624443) Homepage
      For those wondering what the hell 6to4 is when it's at home, here's a brief explanation.

      the /16 prefix 0x2002:: is reserved for 6to4 tunnelling (so it's not something that IANA is going to reclaim any time soon, any more than they're going to reclaim 172.16/12...). A 6to4 TLA is 48 bits in length, and comprises 2002:(your gateway IPv4 address in hex.) For instance, the 6to4 prefix at work, when I was playing with it, was 2002:CB53:9C82: (as the IP I was using was 203.94.156.130.)

      For those unfamiliar with how IPv6 addressing works, under a /48, you have a network space the size of a /16, each of which is its own /64. ie, under 2002:CB53:9C82::, the subnets would be 2002:CB53:9C82::/64 through 2002:CB53:9C82:FFFF/64.

      Each subnet can host up to a /48 of machines, the other half of the address is the Layer 2 address of the endpoint machine passed through an algorithm to convert it to 64 bits in length (forget the RFC which specifies this.)

      The advantage of this setup is that ingress traffic doesn't need to pass through a series of tunnelled networks, as the endpoint address is encoded in the prefix.

      Outbound traffic still passes through a gateway of some nature, which will then figure out how to dispatch the traffic (eg it could be connected to the 6bone, some native 6nets, or the destination address could be another 6to4 address.)

      FreeBSD has a good 6to4 implementation called stf(4). I recommend checking it out if you're curious :)

    • Re:6bone has been replaced by 6to4 (Score:4, Informative)

      by kju ( 327 ) on Sunday March 30, 2003 @05:13AM (#5625494)
      Another example of a mis-scored clueless comment on slashdot. 2002:: (aka 6to4) is not an replacement for 3ffe::, for two simple reasons: 6to4 needs an underlying IPv4 address, and of course this address can't be dynamic to host servers etc (because the 6to4-Address would change every time you get a new IPv4-Address). And no reverse lookup for 2002::...

      So get a clue. 3ffe:: is replaced by production blocks assigned in the 2001:: range. Just as you got a block in 3ffe:: you can get a block in 2001:: from a provider/tunnel broker/whatever. And most of 2001:: is still transported by the means of tunnels - what is what 6bone is/was. So some kind of 6bone is still needed, though it isn't called by this name anymore.

  • 2006? (Score:5, Funny)

    by RobertTaylor ( 444958 ) <roberttaylor1234 AT gmail DOT com> on Saturday March 29, 2003 @07:58PM (#5624092) Homepage Journal
    2006? Who cares, we will all have jet cars by then...

  • IANA (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Am I the only one who reads IANA as "I am not a?"

    • first time i read it as "I am not anal"

      then i went "what?!"

      ad the i realized the correct meaning :)

      • Re:IANA (Score:5, Funny)

        by Jugalator ( 259273 ) on Saturday March 29, 2003 @08:26PM (#5624173) Journal
        first time i read it as "I am not anal"

        Or, if you're a sci-fi nerd liking Isaac Asimov, you'd read IANAL as "I, Anal". ;-)
      • I'd agree with you, except I think you're confusing the organisation IANA with the disclaimer IANAL. I never misread IANA, but it took a while for me to grok just what IANAL actually meant, and until then, "I am not anal" was the best answer I could come up with too :-/

        Hold it! This isn't all that funny. Yours was, tho. Never mind.

  • Hurricane Electric (Score:4, Informative)

    by SiMac ( 409541 ) on Saturday March 29, 2003 @08:03PM (#5624106) Homepage
    Hurricane Electric also provides free IPv6 tunnels [he.net]...I used one to play around with IPv6, but tunnels seem to have fairly high latency.

    • Re:Hurricane Electric (Score:4, Interesting)

      by crimsun ( 4771 ) <crimsun AT ubuntu DOT com> on Saturday March 29, 2003 @08:33PM (#5624188) Homepage
      I've used Freenet6 and Hurricane Electric's tunnels; I must say that he.net's tunnels have had much lower latency [and have been much more reliable] than Freenet6's. That said, Freenet6 was incredibly straight-forward for a lot of users (Debian even does all the bally-hoo for you after your register, but it's nothing a simple self-made script won't accomplish) and certainly should be lauded for their simplicity.

      • Re:Hurricane Electric (Score:3, Interesting)

        by derF024 ( 36585 )
        I've got a Hurricane Electric tunnel, and i'm pretty happy with it as well. i've had connections running through it for a few weeks with no disconnections. the one thing that i really like about Hurricane electric is that once your tunnel is approved, they give you a cut and pasteable set of commands to get your tunnel running with all your IP and subnet information already in it. the freenet6 setup is fairly complicated compared to he.net
  • So from reading the memo, I get the impression that this is the first step in phasing in IPv6 as the Real Deal... am I way off base here, or are we finally gonna be able to get rid of IPv4 once and for all?[1]

    [1] Yeah, I know... backwards compatibility and everything, we'll never *totally* get rid of IPv4, but I'm just so damned tired of the hassles of NAT...

    • Re:Pigs flying, hell freezing over, IPv6 being ado (Score:4, Informative)

      by Arethan ( 223197 ) on Saturday March 29, 2003 @09:48PM (#5624376) Journal
      why do you think that ip6 is going to remove the necessity of NAT? I've seen several network installations that use 1-to-1 NAT. This configuration does not cause anywhere near the number of problems that you are thinking of. I can even think of one site that used 1-to-1 NAT twice on the same network block. Once to go from public IP to a private range, and then on the other side of the network another router did 1-to-1 NAT back to the packets' original IP.

      Not to mention that many users of consumer level NATing devices (Cable/DSL routers) do so for financial reasons, not out of necessity. Why pay your ISP for another IP address when you can run upwards of 200 machines on the one you already have.

      My spouse works for the cable co, so I get free cable modem service, but I only have 1 IP because I'd rather not play the dhcp game with every machine on my home network, praying that they stay within the same subnet so they can talk to eachother directly. Plus, I don't like the idea of all of my local traffic being bridged to the NOC just because the modem firmware doesn't know any better.
      • Your "necessity of NAT" argument is a red-herring because your example clearly shows you have a NAT fetish. It will, most likely, always be necessary to you. Seek help.

        Why pay your ISP for another IP address when they'll give you a /48?

        Why play the DHCP game when IPv6 completely obsoletes DHCP?

        Why worry about whether the computers get stuck on different subnets when IPv6 stacks all cleanly handle being on more than one subnet? (one of which need not be your ISP's)

  • Heh (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 29, 2003 @08:09PM (#5624134)
    Are they afraid they're gonna run out of IPs or something?

  • Did you idiots read the article? (Score:5, Informative)

    by Wakko Warner ( 324 ) on Saturday March 29, 2003 @08:19PM (#5624156) Homepage Journal
    the 6bone network was a TEST NETWORK, if you didn't fully expect this TEST NETWORK to go away after a while, you are just plain delusional.

    Here's the relevant text, snipped from the TOP of the memo (i.e. you didn't even have to read MUCH of it.)

    The 6bone was established in 1996 by the IETF as an IPv6 Testbed network to enable various IPv6 testing as well as to assist in the transitioning of IPv6 into the Internet. It operates under the IPv6 address allocation 3FFE::/16 from RFC 2471. As IPv6 is beginning its production deployment it is appropriate to plan for the phaseout of the 6bone.

    So, please, please, PLEASE stop complaining about something that was supposed to be going away from the very beginning!!!

    - A.P.
    • So, please, please, PLEASE stop complaining about something that was supposed to be going away from the very beginning!!!

      Wakko, we're all dying. Sooner or later, I'm going to be dead, and you're going to be dead.

      So what say I just blow your head off right now?

      No? You don't like that? You don't like the precise timing, even though you *knew* that sooner or later, you had to die?

      Maybe you can understand the viewpoint of the people complaining.

      IPv4 won't be around forever. IPv6 probably won't be arou

  • eh? (Score:4, Funny)

    by Gantic ( 460802 ) on Saturday March 29, 2003 @08:22PM (#5624164)
    6bone? Oh my, i've slipped onto one of those sites again! /me closes before mum walks in

  • Some people just don't get it... (Score:5, Informative)

    by AndroSyn ( 89960 ) on Saturday March 29, 2003 @08:30PM (#5624180) Homepage
    Yes 6bone itself is going away, which means the 3ffe::/16 address allocation is going to be reclaimed down the road. What this means is tunnel brokers like freenet6 are just going to need to get a new address allocation. There are a number of tunnel brokers already using other addresses, mainly under 2001::/16. So for all the posters who are going all doom and gloom, get a clue, wait, this is slashdot.

    I wish people would *read* the articles first and *understand* what they mean before blathering on about them.

    -AS

  • reclaimed by the IANA...?! (Score:5, Funny)

    by lawpoop ( 604919 ) on Saturday March 29, 2003 @08:47PM (#5624216) Homepage Journal
    What? You are not a what?!
  • i have heard of ipv6 and have a vague idea of what it is, but could someone elaberate? why arent we already using it as de facto, and what are the ups and downs to it?

    • Re:what is ipv6? (Score:5, Informative)

      by andrewm ( 9862 ) <andrewm@netwinder.org> on Saturday March 29, 2003 @09:09PM (#5624273) Homepage
      Currently the internet uses IP protocal version 4. Version 6 is supposed to fix some of the problems of ipv4. Notable among these is the larger address space (128 bits instead of 32... actually I seem to recall that this may also have changed in the spec to an expandable scheme(?)), and things like QoS.

      The biggest problem is that none of the primary routers support it. Network providers aren't interested in the expense and difficulty of upgrading, and hence aren't buying the new equipment and software required. Others are waiting for the equipment and software to become more common. In turn, product and software manufacturers aren't terribly interested in it until they get orders. Others are waiting for everyone else to use it (and be the Guinea pigs).

      A "chicken and egg" situation.

      The Internet has some serious problems that need fixing, but it also has way too much inertia to allow change to occur.

      • Re:what is ipv6? (Score:5, Insightful)

        by davew ( 820 ) on Saturday March 29, 2003 @10:12PM (#5624435) Journal
        The biggest problem is that none of the primary routers support it.

        Sources please!

        *cough* two core routers dual-stacked where I work, one scheduled for next wednesday, the rest to follow in the weeks following. Abilene [iu.edu] supports IPv6 natively. CA*net [canarie.ca]supports IPv6 natively. SURFnet [surfnet.nl] supports IPv6 natively. IPv6 traffic exchanged at LINX [linx.org] and AMSIX [ams-ix.net]. NTT Europe launched commercial IPv6 service [ntt.net] in Europe on 19th February.

        Btw. Any chance you could ask your ISP for IPv6 connectivity? From your post it sounds like they could do with some customer demand. :)

        • Which of the commercial tier-1 service providers in North America have IPv6 enabled in their core?

          If it was a zero-cost, zero-risk operation, it would be enabled. Like IP multicast, it's not zero-cost, and isn't enabled.

          • Hang on a second, I'm sure those goalposts were over here a minute ago. :-)

            You're right, there are barriers to deployment of IPv6 (film at 11). That's why you're seeing the most take-up at the moment in the academic networks, at least in the western world (as noted elsewhere, the far east are WAY ahead of the rest of us in IPv6 deployment). We're working out the bugs and creating the initial installed base in advance of people going commercial with it and actually making money out of it.

            This is proper ord
        • Btw. Any chance you could ask your ISP for IPv6 connectivity? From your post it sounds like they could do with some customer demand. :)

          I did, about a month or two ago. They said they had no plans at this time. (sigh)

    • Re:what is ipv6? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by 0x0d0a ( 568518 ) on Saturday March 29, 2003 @10:14PM (#5624439) Journal
      i have heard of ipv6 and have a vague idea of what it is, but could someone elaberate?

      A revision of IPv4. The big things it adds (well, that I care about) are:

      * More QoS stuff. No one used the IPv4 stuff that was already there, but maybe someone will change their mind, and we'll have tiered bandwidth packages someday ("I want 50 megs of high-prio data/week, 5 gigs of regular/week, and 50 gigs of low-prio data/week...if I exhaust my quota, just kick the packets down to the next prio level")
      * IPSec built in. All connections can be encrypted, if both hosts feel like it.
      * Bigger address space. This lets organizations get rid of stupid shit like DHCP/bootp with non-static IPs and NAT. Basically, everyone who wants one can have a static address.

      We aren't using it all over because Cisco routers are overpriced, and companies that spent lots of money on an IPv4 router don't want to do the same for an IPv6 router. It is not used much in the US, because of the huge address space allocated to the US. IPv6 is more commonly used in Japan. There are also a number of people tunneling networks of IPv6 machines together over IPv6, which is what things like the 6bone were designed to do.

      There aren't really any downs to IPv6 other than the replacement costs. Possibly privacy issues -- there's been interest in using your MAC address as the last bits of your IPv6 address, which seems incredibly stupid to me -- like one huge, protocol-independent, world-readable cookie, but whatever.
      • Basically, everyone who wants one can have a static address.

        ...

        There aren't really any downs to IPv6 other than the replacement costs. Possibly privacy issues -- there's been interest in using your MAC address as the last bits of your IPv6 address, which seems incredibly stupid to me -- like one huge, protocol-independent, world-readable cookie, but whatever.

        In which way is a static address not a huge, protocol-independent, world-readable cookie? In Denmark, cable modem users get mostly static address

        • In which way is a static address not a huge, protocol-independent, world-readable cookie?

          It is. But it provides some benefit (a static place to contact me). Using my MAC as the bottom portion of my IP doesn't benefit me at all, and is a drawback.

          It also tells the world what type of system you're running (router, Mac, x86 box, SPARC, etc).

          Unlike an IP, the MAC bits stay the same from provider to provider and from location to location (admittedly, mostly an issue to laptop owners). This is particularly

          • Re:what is ipv6? (Score:3, Informative)

            by amorsen ( 7485 )
            It also tells the world what type of system you're running (router, Mac, x86 box, SPARC, etc)

            Right, I browse the WWW from my router all the time. Sun has a MAC range, but the addresses are easily changeable. Whether Apple has one or uses it I do not know, but plug any random PCI ethernet NIC into it, and suddenly your Mac becomes a PC.

            It hands out the MAC to anyone on the Internet, which can be nice for MAC-related attacks if a hacker can compromise a nearby system...

            If the hacker can compromise a n

  • huh? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    does anyone know what in the hell this story is about?

  • Don't bitch... thank! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by rice_burners_suck ( 243660 ) on Saturday March 29, 2003 @09:09PM (#5624272)
    Yeah... SO WHAT? They told us this was going to happen back in '96 or '97 or whenever this thing was established. The 6bone was nothing more than a test (though a long one, considering it has become an established part of the landscape in the 6 or 7 years since its inception) for IPv6, and free IPv6 networks exist for the sole purpose of giving folks and organizations some incentive to spend time and money to test something that really doesn't directly benefit them (although it will in the future, but who cares about that when you've got your next quarter's bottom line to lose sleep over).

    ON TOPIC: It reminds me when I was a kid and our neighborhood was being built over a period of several years. It wasn't one of those circuit neighborhoods where they develop three floor plans and build 1000 identical homes. This was a neighborhood where you bought the land and were then responsible for buying your own floorplan and/or hiring an architect to design or modify one for you. We had lived there for a number of years, and during that time, my friends and I had turned some abandoned lots, still covered with trees "in the wild", into our "clubhouse." It was really cool. We had put together these cheezy, sloppy little shacks with all kinds of construction leftovers from other parts of the neighborhood, like 2x4s and pieces of thrown away plywood. It was probably dangerous--these things could have toppled over on our heads because they certainly weren't nailed in place. But we were kids, so who cared? There was even a small crater where a four-seater airplane crashed some years before, and that was our "punishment hole." If all the kids voted that one of the kids was a troublemaker or a bully or something, then when that kid came outside to play, he had to sit in that pit all day without being allowed to play with the rest of us, and this had to go on for a specified number of days. (Nobody ever got sentenced to that punishment though.) It was really cool, and this went on for a number of years. One day, we go to our "clubhouse" to find that all our stuff was taken down and there was a big bulldozer knocking over all the wild foliage. They had already taken down a few of the trees and were in the process of clearing the rest of the land to begin construction of a house. Of course, I was a kid and didn't understand these concepts, so I remember running home to my parents and yelling that someone was tearing down our clubhouse! They explained that this land had belonged to someone throughout all the years that we had used it as a clubhouse but they just now got around to developing it. So how come we were being kicked out, I asked... My parents said, "You should be happy that they let you use that land for all this time, instead of complaining that you're being kicked out!"

    That's what I have to say about this 6bone. Don't bitch about getting kicked off. Be grateful that you had the 6bone at your disposal for about six years. And then drink Negra Modelo, get drunk, and feel no pain.

  • IPv6 Tunnel Provider (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    By far the best tunnel provider I've used is IPNG-UK [ipng.org.uk]. I can whole-heartedly recommend it to anybody wanting to use IPv6 now!

  • Pardon my irritation... (Score:5, Informative)

    by davew ( 820 ) on Saturday March 29, 2003 @09:54PM (#5624392) Journal

    ...but this story is crud on so many levels.

    • 3FFE::/16 is the experimental 6bone space, where you try out allocation policies before settling on a real one. They've settled on a real one [ripe.net]. Even better, it's the same in all [ripe.net] three [arin.net] (er, four [lacnic.net]) regions [apnic.net]. The 6bone's purpose is fulfilled , we're in production mode and, as was always intended, it's time to think about retiring it.
    • How many times: IP address don't cost money. Sure, the RIRs charge for the service of allocation, and your ISP is entitled to charge for the services around them. They do their job pretty well, and with consensus of the community (a rarity in this day and age [icann.org]). Great as Bob Fink is, do you really want to continue trusting address allocation to one guy as a volunteer project?
    • You get addresses from your ISP.
    • You get addresses from your ISP.
    • You get addresses from your ISP. There are loads of them. If you need them, you can have them. The expense is not in getting the damn addresses. "Experimental" does not mean "free". "Production" does not mean "business".
    • AftanGustur: IPv6 is not a bastard protocol, routers don't need to fragment anymore, and the IETF is not working on a new damn protocol [slashdot.org]. You don't cite any sources, so I can't refute it. Please do.

    Guys, there are a lot of misconceptions about IPv6. I appreciate this - it's not an intuitive subject, and it's possible to believe you know a lot more about it than you actually do. But, the details are there. Please do the reading [6bone.net] and start asking your ISP for connectivity. No, your real ISP. There are people out there who want to deploy this, now, and we're waiting for customer demand. Go nuts!

    Dave

    • Re:Pardon my irritation... (Score:3, Informative)

      by CvD ( 94050 )
      My awesome ISP [xs4all.nl] took their own initiative and set up various scripts and pages where you can figure out how to set up your own 6in4 tunnel and network. They even have some CGI scripts which generate settings for your flavour of OS which you can type in and it'll just work. (sorry, the scripts are behind a login, so I can't link to them).

      Also how to set up the machine you have your tunnel endpoint as being a router for the rest of your internal network (with radvd, etc). Very cool. XS4ALL rocks! THE Geek/ner

  • 1 IPv4 address = a /48 of IPv6 address space (Score:5, Informative)

    by hpa ( 7948 ) on Saturday March 29, 2003 @10:09PM (#5624427) Homepage
    Note that any single IPv4 address can be used to claim a /48 -- that's 80 bits of address space -- of IPv6 address space by sticking 2002: in front of it, e.g. 192.0.2.69 -> 2002:c000:0245::/48. This is called 6to4; see RFC 3056 [ietf.org].

  • IPv6 address allocations? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 29, 2003 @11:04PM (#5624579)
    How are IPv6 addresses going to be allocated? Will everyone have to pay a sum of money to the IANA? If so, perhaps now is the time to grab a slice of address space for the people of planet earth?

    Given that there are 2^128 (= 3.4*10^38) addresses available, how about a group unilaterally grabs around 10^30, a very small (negligible?) portion, for free distribution? Each person on earth gets allocated around 10^20 addresses for their personal use. Allocation could be done by setting up a web site and having a script that keeps track of enough details to uniquely identify a person and allocating them an address block. It will be up to each person to honour others' address allocations and keep to their own turf. Given that each person can easily get 10^20 addresses of their own, hopefully the incentive to invade other people's address space will be small. As new people are born, parents can divide their family pool among their children. 10^20 addresses should see even the most active couple out for quite a few generations.

    IANA can have fun assigning the rest of the (10^38-10^30 = a big number) addresses.

    If IANA don't like this, they can go and make a running jump. As long as enough people participate in the scheme (and the network is decentralised enough) it will work.

    NOW is the time to do this! One does not need the network to be implemented to allocate addresses!. If by the time IPv6 hit the streets a few tens of millions of people have personal address spaces allocated, it will be difficult to demand that IANA be the sole issuing authority. If enough people have allocations, and someone tries to take them away, the ballot box might even come into play.

    The above is just an idea.

  • IPv6 is NOT going away (Score:5, Insightful)

    by MrChuck ( 14227 ) on Saturday March 29, 2003 @11:04PM (#5624580)
    There are a bunch of responses here from apparent idiots (sort of par).
    These ones think it means a withdrawal of IPv6.

    Far from it. The 6bone was established when nobody had IPv6 stacks really, nobody really used it. It was a playground to try it out. And we have been.
    Now, Sun has IPv6, Cisco has it ready and waiting, the BSD's all have, Linux has it, AIX, HPUX, MacOS X. Hell even Windows has it. (I await MS's announcement of its invention soon).

    IPv6 is here and ready and tested.

    The notion of closing the 6bone (discussed for months on the 6bone lists), is that in 3 years you SHOULD be able to get IPv6. Not tunneled, no long hops.

    Me? I call my cable modem people (dsl before I moved) and would get the second level tech support people and ask for IPv6 support. Try to get it on their radar. Wouldn't you love your cell phone to have an IP address? Hell, wouldn't you love a (firewalled) IPv6 aware electrical outlet? (x10 is getting old and lame).

    So you have 3 years to convince your ISP that they should have IPv6.

    This isn't the place to go into details, but it's designed and planned to run concurrently with IPv4. This isn't like the NCP/TCP change over where there was a huge redflag day for all 200 hosts on the Arpa net.
    Everything in my house speaks IPv6 except a printer and a terminal server (you do all have terminal servers for those serial toys, yes?). Those will never be upgraded - too old. When I ssh, mail or browse, if they have a 6 address and I can reach it, it gets used. Otherwise it falls back to IPv4.

    At work, if you have a subnet with all IPv6, you can turn off IPv4 and let your edge gateway it. But you may not be turning off all the IPv4 until that last printer dies. Do it subnet by subnet and leave IPv4, but just watch it not be used.

    Bonuses?
    No more need for NAT (I have 65 thousand INTERNETS of addresses here).
    IPv6 stacks are looking faster than IPv4 (not based on a presumption of 16 bit PDP-11 processors).

    So where the hell is www.slashdot.org?
    nslookup -q=aaaa www.slashdot.org
    Can't find www.slashdot.org: Non-existent host/domain

    • So where the hell is www.slashdot.org?
      nslookup -q=aaaa www.slashdot.org
      Can't find www.slashdot.org: Non-existent host/domain

      Why do they need to be on IPv6? Hell, even Slashdot won't qualify for permanent IPv6 address space. One reason is that everyone has IPv4. When there are finally some people who are on IPv6-only, then it will be time to get Slashdot and other places on IPv6 (in addition to staying on IPv4).

      It's not about whether IPv6 is going away or not. Obviously it's here to stay. But unles

  • I am totally underwhemled by this turn of events.

  • IPv6 is DOA (Score:2, Troll)

    by Skapare ( 16644 )

    Given that IPv4 space is no longer at risk of being exhausted, there is virtually no real incentive to switching to IPv6. The only one that exists right now is the "geek factor", a measure of "coolness" recognized only by other geeks (and then, most of those are now considering it to be boring).

    Had the IPv6 proponents really wanted to get more people to switch to IPv6, they would have wised up and offered something substantial. Free IPv6 addresses in the 6bone that were never intended to be permanent sim

    • Re:IPv6 is DOA (Score:2, Informative)

      by Cid Highwind ( 9258 )
      Given that IPv4 space is no longer at risk of being exhausted...
      That's not really a given, you ought to prove it.
      Barring genocide or a complete halt to the current trend in internet access growth, I don't think IPv4 is going to last forever.

  • Cost of IPv6 Addresses (Score:3, Interesting)

    by sourcehunter ( 233036 ) on Sunday March 30, 2003 @02:22AM (#5625144) Homepage
    I have a question - Why do IPv6 addresses cost so darned much if you want your own block direct from ARIN (or another RIR)? For a /32, they are charging $2500/year. Is that just to keep people from applying for their own "personal" /32 address space?

    I mean, I understood why IPv4 addresses cost so damned much - there was a really limited supply. (Having taken econ in high school and college, I'd like to think I understand the basics of supply and demand.)

    I thought the point of ipv6 was that there was so huge a supply that it really didn't matter. So - then - WHY do they charge so much for blocks? $2500/year is a lot! Yeah, I know, on a PER ADDRESS basis it is nil, but still!

    Anyone have an answer?

    Or is it "because they can?"

    • Is that just to keep people from applying for their own "personal" /32 address space?

      I think you got it right there. The policy for IPv6 is that huge ISPs get space from the RIRs and sublet it to their customers. For a huge ISP, $2500/year is not a big deal. If the address blocks were free they'd have to wade through zillions of invalid requests from mom-and-pop ISPs.
    • A /32 net is a really big chunk that is intended for providers, not users. You should get a /48 from your provider without problems, which leaves you with 2^16 local subnets and 2^64 hosts per subnet.

      • But that address space won't work when I switch provider. I get my IPv4 address spaces from my provider now, and they have the same problem, and IPv6 isn't solving it. I can't get a big portable allocation of IPv4 because IPv4 would run out if they did that. IPv6 won't, but they still won't give out portable address space because they forgot to deal with the routing issue. So now they've got this "spruce goose" of a new IP architecture which is probably going to have to be replaced anyway to do a univer

        • Changing addresses isn't just about renumbering your network and fixing each computer. IPv4 had a really "elegant" (and by "elegant" I mean "crapily hacked together to make work") fix called DHCP that meant, if you did your work upfront to assign everything a "static" ip from the DHCP server based on MAC address, then you'd just change the info on the server and be done with it.

          The problem is changing the 1000s of DNS entries. One of the ASPs I work with host something in the realm of 200 domains. the

    • Part of the problem goes all the way back to the flaws in the original requirements for IPv6. The flaw is that IPv6 was intended only to add address space, and not deal with the more serious scaling issue of routing. Unfortunately, routing is a complex problem which just doesn't readily fit into the kinds of address space technology both IPv4 and IPv6 are based on. The problem with routing the way it is done now is that every autonomous system has to be represented with the prefix of their address space

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