D&C GLug - Home Page

[ Date Index ] [ Thread Index ] [ <= Previous by date / thread ] [ Next by date / thread => ]

Re: [LUG] Your ISP - and IPv6

 

yes, i checked my logs BA, and thanks for looking Hardware firewall on it's way!


On 5 July 2013 20:13, bad apple <mr.meowski@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
On 05/07/13 19:49, Simon Avery wrote:
>> 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.
>
>

Yeah, everything Simon said.

I'm actually well ahead of the curve - one of the first support gigs I
ever did, 11 or 12 years ago now, was testing and implementing IPv6 on
Solaris boxes as part of an experimental intranet for a NHS
subcontractor. It was a bit of a nightmare (Sun had only just rolled the
code in and it wasn't very good) so whilst it was tested, we decided
there was no way we were actually going to use it. Ever since then, I
can count the times I've been asked to deal with IPv6 on the fingers of
one hand. I do have a 6-to-4 tunnel available at home, just because I
like playing with things, but it's never been used in anger.

IPv6 is a complete non-event when it comes to consumers, and not even
worth thinking about - IPv4, probably via various horrible shims, will
be alive and kicking forever I should think. Eventually, one day, your
ISP (as long as they're not Plusnet) will almost definitely support IPv6
and will ship you a suitable router but I wouldn't waste even one second
of your time thinking about it. I promise you that your IPv4 address is
not going to suddenly fail on you when the last IP in the last block is
assigned some time later this year.

Personally IPv6 annoys me, because it makes port-scanning really hard
and iptables/pf rules much harder to mentally parse!

Regards

--
The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG
http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list
FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/listfaq

-- 
The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG
http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list
FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/listfaq