Re: [LUG] Your ISP

I have been seeing and hearing more about IPv6 recently. Now I don't know much about it, but it seems that the older IPv4 numbers are running out. Again, I am not sure if there is any urgency to change yet.

So, does anyone on the list have any thoughts, opinions, on this please?

Lots has been said in support of it. And I'm not going to be too much of a luddite, just point out that as a consumer, you don't *need* to make that choice. Not now, and likely not for many years.

Unless you specifically need static ip addresses (ipv4, and I kinda like them, but I'm not a typical user), life will continue to go on. The ipv4's in existence that your ISP has will stay with them and somewhere along the line they'll either supply ipv6 as well, or carrier grade nat. If the latter, your life will continue exactly the same as most customers do at the moment - but instead of getting allocated a dynamic ip all to yourself, you'll share that with others. Almost exactly the same as many devices share a single ip via your own lan and your router, just on a bigger scale.

If you choose to go down the ipv6 route because you're interested, and that's a fine reason, be aware that many devices don't support it. Many, if not most, adsl routers being sold today do not support ipv6 and won't work. This is a major reason isp's are not rushing forward because of the reprovisioning and lashback from customers who don't see a need to change. Also their own provisioning costs are going to be significant, their own routers may or may not be firmware upgradeable (most are though), and all their systems may need recoding, such as metering, abuse monitoring or billing. My own software knows nothing about ipv6 parsing and you can bet that's a problem throughout the internet at every level. Parsing and storing ips is frequent, and will need consideration. Even to the max length of varchars for an ip in a database being overlooked at an ipv6 address truncated.

And then onto the mundane - banning somebody's ip address for abuse on a forum/webserver/game. Do that with carrier grade NAT and poof, you've taken out potentially thousands of users with one ip. How this translates into upnp and incoming ports I have no idea, except that it's going to be tricky.

This is a pretty big problem on the technical side, and I think those involved are being cautious and broadly sensible in slow adoption to ensure wrinkles are ironed out.

Re: [LUG] Your ISP - and IPv6