IPv6

[jbailey]

Slashdot had a post this evening about the update to the O'Reilly IPv6 book.

I took a scan of the comments, and got the usual bits - why would someone bother? What's the killer app? We're not running out of oil^Waddresses! While I don't claim to be an expert on the topic, where I have used IPv6 succesfully is on my home network. Where NAT is really annoying for geeks is that our ISPs give us one IP address, make it move around occasionally, and tell us we can't run servers on it. Add an IPv6 tunnel to this, and it doesn't really matter what my ISP thinks. My machines remain trivially addressable. Scanning the address space to try and hammer on the boxes is a non-trivial task and by-and-large, Windows zombies aren't usually talking on IPv6.

This isn't a permanent nirvana, but if general attitudes about v6 are the same as the drones on /., then my little workaround hack will persist for a while.

Comments

[terminal-pariah.livejournal.com]

I eventually left Slashdot behind in favour of Digg, although the comments are arguably worse, i.e. "How secure can GPG be when anyone can look at the source code?"

The v6 revolution will come when we can convince businesses that it will save them money. Unfortunately people are getting altogether too good at working around NATs so I can see it being a hard sell to consumers.

[jbailey.livejournal.com]

In general, I don't think one should expect innovation from business. IT departments are always behind the curve, and the sales reps at the vendors don't understand the technology that they're selling. I think IPv6 will start to take off when it solves a problem that geeks have.

And I'm arguing that it solves that problem now. From my laptop, I can access my machines and those of certain friends of mine with no difficulties. There are no ISP firewalls in the way, or anything crazy like that. The ports being visible on IPv6 only means that I don't worry about zero-day exploits as much.

How I think this translates into future take-up is that someone will eventually start hosting torents on their v6, or running a pirate site, or a porn site, or something that the ISP would usually catch and sensor. If content is king/queen/Prince[0] I'd expect it to start in that realm. More to the point, I assume it already has. So in the dorm rooms, on this super-imposed network, we'll slowly find things that people want, and the demand for it will kick in.

And it'll be interesting to watch ISPs, law enforcement and such to catch up, as always. =)

[0] Prince is the best I can come up with for transgender royalty, sorry.

[terminal-pariah.livejournal.com]

I agree that v6 could be driven faster by consumers, but the problems with that are:
a) you'd need a v6 tunneling provider who doesn't mind gigs upon gigs of torrent/porn/etc. traffic
b) you'd need these same users to stop making NATs work.

As it stands I can fire up uTorrent, KCeasy, Skype or whatever and have it all work out of the box. Hamachi (http://www.hamachi.cc/) is the equivalent when it comes to remoting/VPNs.

Great work!

[(Anonymous)]

Great resource. keep it up!!Thanks a lot for interesting discussion, I found a lot of useful information!With the best regards!
Frank