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On 22/01/12 18:28, Gordon Henderson wrote:
Your not wrong - but there is nothing for me to prepare for for. I can read up on IPv6 but you can can bet that my ISP wont do it sensibly, if they do it should be ten seconds with the router and that should be it for me. If not then I'm sitting on IPv4 till they sort it. I've worked at companies where we've had 1600 people behind 1 IPv4 address and its worked - ftp and all. I've run ~30 websites off one as well - Apache can do this with its eyes shut. Big, really big people may need more than 1 IPv4 - but for an 'SME' thats just 'consumes' the internet rather than doing anything out of the ordinary. IPv6 will be an interesting period - it will be like the first few years of the internet but with 500 times more things to go wrong with a million times the pressure on those inadequately trained to turn on a PC let alone manage a simple routing table. And like the first few years people will be going 'Wow I've got a connection!' and staring at the screen in relief and celebrating 2.4kB down FTTC if they're lucky while 300meg videos clog up every available packet until they're lost forever in some poor buggers mail server.On Sun, 22 Jan 2012, tom wrote:On 22/01/12 17:02, Martijn Grooten wrote:On Sun, Jan 22, 2012 at 4:13 PM, Neil Winchurst wrote:There has been a lot of emails on the list recently about IPv6. I am a little confused about all this, and I suspect that I am not alone. I get the impression that IPv6 is coming in to replace IPv4 but is taking a long time to happen. At the moment for most people there is no point in worrying about it, IPv4 will carry on working for the foreseeable future .Also many ISP's are dragging their heels about this so are not yet readyfor it. And, there are not yet many suitable routers on the market.These are the 'facts' as I see them at the moment, but I am ready to becorrected. So can anyone put me right if necessary please? I think others on the list will be interested too.You put it all quite well. IPv4, the 'current' IP protocol, supports 32-bit IP-addresses like 80.68.88.22, where every 'part' has an 8-bit value which can thus range between 0 and 255. This gives just over 4 billion possible IP addresses (for a number of reasons not all of which can be used). With a world population of around 7 billion, many of whom use (or will use) more than one device, that is nowhere near enough.That's not quite true - I've got one IP address and I can, using IP4 have millions of devices behind it and not suffer any conflicts. I can host millions of web sites on that same IP address. There are nowhere near 4 billion devices connected directly to the internet - its just thereʼs a lot of squatting going on - people with allocations that are not used and are technically tricky to use anywhere else.How would you handle 100 virtual PBX servers behind one IP address? (Or 100 boxes requiring FTP and shell access) Tell all your clients to use different ports? That's not going to go down well, I can assure you!So while what you say is mostly true, there are limitations. e.g. virtual servers - I host many physical servers and many many more virtual servers. I need to give the virtual servers their own IP address. I also need to give websites running on the same physical host their own IP address if they are to have an SSL certificate. The majority of IP addresses I have in the data centre go to SSH based sites and virtual servers.The other limitation is the administrative overhead - somewhere the front-end (e.g. apache or a dedicated appliance) needs to track all that data and keep track of all the incoming requests, match against target web URL, direct the commands to the right bit of server/code and back again - it's a sort of NAT at the layer 3 level, but it still needs resources to manage - so bigger servers/routers with more memory and fast data paths and processors...Big NAT engines also require resources - money to buy the boxes that will handle 1000's of clients behind them at multi 10/40 Gb speeds.So there are limitations and it's not always going to be easy.You could (theoretically) re-allocate IP ranges and the problem would go away - almost certainly for long enough for us not to worry about it again in our lifetimes - but that is politically tricky and wont sell a whole bunch of hardware we dont really need.There really isn't that much to re-allocate - and as you pointed out, "politically" it just won't happen.I think we will see issues in out lifetime and I'll be surprised if we don't start to see them soomer rather than later. Certianly by the end of this decade - the Internet won't stop working, but it's going to change.So there's no point burying your head about it - it costs nothing but some of your time to read up on IPv6 and how it works and what those funny numbers and clons mean, and anyone can get an account with a tunnel broker and tunnel IPv6 from their Linux PC - so what are you waiting for?Gordon
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