Just in case anyone was wondering, U.S. gummint agencies will
be screaming in migration agony for the next couple of years. 
http://www.fcw.com/article89432-06-29-05-Web
- ferg
GOSIP II anybody? Will it be different this time than it was with OSI? Everyone had to scramble in the late 1980s to get OSI stuff done, then the gov't never used it.
Just in case anyone was wondering, U.S. gummint agencies will
be screaming in migration agony for the next couple of years.
Well, when I was in the "gummint", we used to get these missives all the the time.
(My personal favorite was the one that said that US Navy had to conduct all email over Outlook for
security reasons.)
We waivered or ignored every one.
So I wouldn't count on this, either.
Regards
Marshall Eubanks
I worked for DISA at the time of GOSIP, in their Network Infrastructure group. My boss was a major critic, and was on one of the important boards (DISA would have to deploy GOSIP internally before anyone else would be able to use it). He came in to his office very, very happy one day. I also remember X.400 and X.500.
  Trust me, IPv6 really is different from GOSIP. In the former case, the drivers are outside the government, mainly in Asia. In the latter case, the sole driver was the government, and no one outside of the government wanted to touch it. More importantly, there are a lot of places that are using IPv6 in the real world, and that never happened with GOSIP.
Having been in the US gov't (too) at the time of GOSIP, there were three reasons why I never used it much:
1) No budget was ever allocated to convert operations. (We had products, but we weren't forced, induced, encouraged to use it.)
2) The API for the GOSIP protocols was not standard - not only different from the API for TCP/IP, the API for GOSIP varied by platform. (POSIX had just begun.)
3) There was no tidbit of information available over the network that was on a server that spoke only GOSIP and not TCP/IP. (No compelling reason.)
So, the questions are: will OMB fund the transfer of the US gov't sites? Will there ever be a US gov't web site only on IPv6? (I think the API issue has been solved.)
>
> Just in case anyone was wondering, U.S. gummint agencies will
> be screaming in migration agony for the next couple of years.
>
> http://www.fcw.com/article89432-06-29-05-WebWell, when I was in the "gummint", we used to get these missives all the the time.
(My personal favorite was the one that said that US Navy had to conduct all email over Outlook for
security reasons.)We waivered or ignored every one.
So I wouldn't count on this, either.
Regards
Marshall Eubanks
Then there was, about 1989 or 1990, the one that all Military IT purchases had to be OSI Compliant
TP0/CLNP Anybody?
Regards.
                                 Ted Fischer
And about that same time frame was when they (gummit) said all programming in
the future had to be done in ADA ...
Having been in the US gov't (too) at the time of GOSIP, there were
three reasons why I never used it much:
[...]
3) There was no tidbit of information available over the network that
was on a server that spoke only GOSIP and not TCP/IP. (No compelling
reason.)
this is telling in this context.
where is the service that is available only on IPv6? i can't seem to
find it.
maybe that's because i use the Internet for my daily activities (as
does everyone else, including people in asia) rather than some
non-internet, incompatible, no-migration-plan-protocol-based network.
manually configured tunnels forver! (until we stop caring or come up
with a real reason to migrate to something else, by which plan maybe
we can have a migration plan and a better protocol suite with
multi-homing).
You might ask yourself whether the Kame Turtle is dancing at http://www.kame.net/. This is a service that is *different* (returns a different web page) depending on whether you access it using IPv6 or IPv4. You might also look at IP mobility, and the routing being done for the US Army's WIN-T program. Link-local addresses and some of the improved flexibility of the IPv6 stack has figured in there.
There are a number of IPv6-only or IPv6-dominant networks, mostly in Asia-Pac. NTT Communications runs one as a trial customer network, with a variety of services running over it. The various constituent networks of the CNGI are IPv6-only. There are others.
Maybe you're saying that all of the applications you can think of run over IPv4 networks a well as IPv6, and if so you would be correct. As someone else said earlier in the thread, the reason to use IPv6 has to do with addresses, not the various issues brought up in the marketing hype. The reason the CNGI went all-IPv6 is pretty simple: on the North American continent, there are ~350M people, and Arin serves them with 75 /8s. In the Chinese *University*System*, there are ~320M people, and the Chinese figured they could be really thrifty and serve them using only 72 /8s. I know that this is absolutely surprising, but APNIC didn't give CERNET 72 /8s several years ago when they asked. I really can't imagine why. The fact that doing so would run the IPv4 address space instantly into the ground wouldn't be a factor would it? So CNGI went where they could predictably get the addresses they would need.
Oh, by the way. Not everyone in China is in the Universities. They also have business there, or so they tell me...
The point made in the article that Fergie forwarded was that Asia and Europe are moving to IPv6, whether you agree that they need to or not, and sooner or later we will have to run it in order to talk with them. They are business partners, and we *will* have to talk with them. We, the US, have made a few my-way-or-the-highway stands in the past, such as "who makes cell phones" and such. When the rest of the world went a different way, we wound up be net consumers of their products. Innovation transfered to them, and market share.
The good senator is worried that head-in-the-sand attitudes like the one above will similarly relegate us to the back seat in a few years in the Internet.
Call him "Chicken Little" if you like. But remember: even Chicken Little is occasionally right.
heh. i guess i'll have to live without the dancing turtle, and so
will all the other Internet users. i wonder what other useful content
is not available on the real Internet and only available via ipv6. i
keep asking this question and keep getting non-answers like this.
the rest of fred's comment stands with useful information but i'm
still looking for the tipping point where people migrate, en-masse,
away from the Internet to this new, incompatible network.
t.
You can color me skeptical on IPv6 - basing this on attending way too many PPT presentations on the subject and only limited hands on experience. But while I think the tipping point doesn't exist today, I bet it will sooner or later.
IPv6 is not all that "incompatible" with IPv4 really, it's a lot closer than CLNP and UDP. It's not that IPv6 is chasing what IPv4 already offers. A lot of the improvements to IPv4 are thanks to IPv6. The fact remains that IPv6's expanded address range will be what makes it trump IPv4 eventually.
It's not GOSIP all over again. But the USG's OMB statement may not be the panacea to the fans of IPv6.
Todd Underwood wrote:
where is the service that is available only on IPv6? i can't seem to
find it.
A better question would be "What services does the competition offer
via IPv6?" If the answer is "none" then how long will that
situation last? What point along the adoption curve do you want to be?
manually configured tunnels forver!
There are fully native IPv6 networks here in the US, large and small.
Most exchange points support native IPv6. I'm sure most "netowrk
operators" on this list could connect natively with minimal effort.
Tunnels serve a useful purpose when dealing with networks you don't
control, just like VPN's. Most of the operational problems in IPv6
today involve intentionally broken routing policies, not tunnels.
- Kevin
Fred Baker wrote:
where is the service that is available only on IPv6? i can't seem to find it.
In the Chinese *University*System*, there are ~320M people, and the Chinese figured they could be really thrifty and serve them using only 72 /8s. I know that this is absolutely surprising, but APNIC didn't give CERNET 72 /8s several years ago when they asked. I really can't imagine why. The fact that doing so would run the IPv4 address space instantly into the ground wouldn't be a factor would it? So CNGI went where they could predictably get the addresses they would need.
Excuse me, but I highly doubt that China has 320M people in the universities.
That would be about 25% of their entire population, or 35% of the population
15-64 years old. It may be that there are 320M people in the whole education
system at the moment (including elementary school). That said I can understand
why APNIC refused to give them 72 /8s.
The only reason north America has such an unproportional high IPv4 density
is because the Internet started there and for a long time large netblocks
were handed out like free candies to kids. If NA had todays allocation
system and rules from the beginning there would not be such a difference
to the other regions.
Oh, by the way. Not everyone in China is in the Universities. They also have business there, or so they tell me...
The point made in the article that Fergie forwarded was that Asia and Europe are moving to IPv6, whether you agree that they need to or not, and sooner or later we will have to run it in order to talk with them.
Huh, Europe is moving to IPv6? I must have been asleep at all industry
meeting in the past few month and years...
The problem with IPv6 is that it is broken by design and doesn't solve a
thing that needs to be solved. In addition various policies around IPv6
intermix layers that don't want to me mixed.
I'm going out on a limb here but IMO IPv6 would have been a big success
if it would just have extended the IP header to 64bit addresses and
rearranged the fields to be well aligned (modulo kicking header checksum
and some other clarifications). Then directly integrate IPv4 into that
namespace for a relativly clear and transparent transition path and be
done with it. All the other stuff and the different address scopes are
not only impractical but confuse the average consumer and MCSE admin to
no end (and those are the people that have to deal with it all the time).
return (ENOKITCHENSINK);
Hi,
where is the service that is available only on IPv6? i can't seem to
find it.You might ask yourself whether the Kame Turtle is dancing at
http://www.kame.net/. This is a service that is *different* (returns a
different web page) depending on whether you access it using IPv6 or
IPv4.heh. i guess i'll have to live without the dancing turtle, and so
will all the other Internet users. i wonder what other useful content
is not available on the real Internet and only available via ipv6. i
"the real internet" is v4 and v6. the v6 subset is atm a very small one, but there are no doubts about its existence. Some ASes are starting to be dual-stacked, some others are still v4-only.
keep asking this question and keep getting non-answers like this.
the idea is not to have contents that are unavailable through ipv4.
IPv6 is simply a network layer.
the rest of fred's comment stands with useful information but i'm
still looking for the tipping point where people migrate, en-masse,
away from the Internet to this new, incompatible network.
that's not really the idea. the idea is to build a dual-stack global internet (which in its v6 part will be a more scalable and extendable one).
imho, flag days are generally a bad idea...
Regards,
./Carlos
A better question would be "What services does the competition
offer via IPv6?" If the answer is "none" then how long will that
situation last? What point along the adoption curve do you want
to be?
that's simple, when it makes money, the kind that shows up on the
p/l. when will that happen and why?
randy
[reply to Andre below this one]
> Having been in the US gov't (too) at the time of GOSIP, there were
> three reasons why I never used it much:
[...]
> 3) There was no tidbit of information available over the network that
> was on a server that spoke only GOSIP and not TCP/IP. (No compelling
> reason.)this is telling in this context.
where is the service that is available only on IPv6? i can't seem to
find it.
http://ipv6gate.sixxs.net which allows you to see the silly dancing
turtle, it is swimming actually, but you didn't know as you didn't see
it 
Oh that thing allows one to see IPv4 sites when having IPv6 only and
seeing IPv6 sites when having IPv4 only:
http://www.kame.net.sixxs.org or http://www.kame.net.ipv6.sixxs.org for
the Dancing Kame when on IPv4, getting the IPv6 site
http://www.google.com.ipv4.sixxs.org for google, who don't do IPv6 yet.
As for the questions "who uses IPv6", I can tell you that that gateway
is making a certain politically-restricted group very happy to be able
to see/read/use various internet sites they are not capable of using
when using their normal IPv4 setup.
maybe that's because i use the Internet for my daily activities (as
does everyone else, including people in asia) rather than some
non-internet, incompatible, no-migration-plan-protocol-based network.
I am very happy to have been using IPv6 for over the last 5 years to be
able to overcome, just as the above, silly policies which where laid
upon me by goverments and monopolies. read: getting only 1 IP address
while I have way more than 1 IP-addressable endpoint at my home.
manually configured tunnels forver! (until we stop caring or come up
with a real reason to migrate to something else, by which plan maybe
we can have a migration plan and a better protocol suite with
multi-homing).
You mean automatically configured tunnels. Most people don't understand
what tunneling is, they do know how to click a couple of times in a GUI.
google(aiccu)
Fred Baker wrote:
> The point made in the article that Fergie forwarded was that Asia and
> Europe are moving to IPv6, whether you agree that they need to or not,
> and sooner or later we will have to run it in order to talk with them.Huh, Europe is moving to IPv6? I must have been asleep at all industry
meeting in the past few month and years...
Ah, well that explains indeed why you are missing out on it.
Read up at: http://www.sixxs.net/tools/grh/dfp/
The problem with IPv6 is that it is broken by design and doesn't solve a
thing that needs to be solved. In addition various policies around IPv6
intermix layers that don't want to me mixed.
You still have not explained the "broken by design" stuff. Can you do it once?
As for the policies, those will resolve themselves, at the moment it is
steering into a "announce as few prefixes as possible, but you can announce upto a /48".
Which sounds quite reasonable. The hardware can handle it anyway.
I'm going out on a limb here but IMO IPv6 would have been a big success
if it would just have extended the IP header to 64bit addresses and
rearranged the fields to be well aligned (modulo kicking header checksum
and some other clarifications).
For various reasons, amongst that feature called autoconfiguration, 128bits
are more appropriate. Actually IPv6 is 64-bits, at least on the routing level.
That the endstretch checks the latter 64 bits where to put it on the l2 link
is something you could just forget for simplicity sake.
Then directly integrate IPv4 into that
namespace for a relativly clear and transparent transition path and be
done with it.
You mean ::192.0.2.1 and ::ffff:192.0.2.1 ?
Any idea how irritating those two are for programmers?
One has a listening server and does a accept() and then a getpeername() to
retrieve where the remote host is, you get an IPv6 address back, which you
suddenly have to be parsing as a IPv4 one, because you wanted to do ACL matches.
Now that is impractical, one can code around it but still.
read http://gsyc.escet.urjc.es/~eva/IPv6-web/ipv6.html for the solution btw.
The transition part is very clear, there are just many options because
there are actually people who have different networks than what you might expect.
The clear way:
0) we have IPv4 only boxes
1) add IPv6 stack to the boxes
2) turn on IPv6 on the network
    - using tunnels where l2 paths don't support it
    - using native where it does support it
3) upgrade the tools to support IPv6
4) co-exist IPv4 and IPv6
Nopes, I am not putting in a 'turn off IPv4', that is not going to happen
in the coming couple of decenias.
  All the other stuff and the different address scopes are
not only impractical but confuse the average consumer and MCSE admin to
no end (and those are the people that have to deal with it all the time).
Why are they impractical? The only address scopes you have is:
- link local, compare it to your l2 mac address, it is mostly the same anyway
- global unicast, which is the same as IPv4 unicast
Then you also have multicast and ula's. What is so weird here?
I've never found them impractical, did you ever tried to use them?
return (ENOKITCHENSINK);
If you don't have a kitchensink then you can always go to a restaurant
Fortunately the internet can live and work around missing components.
And when you don't like it, write up a paper how you do think it would
work and call it IPv8 or IPv16, but that was proposed quite some time
ago by somebody who is fortunately gone silent.
Greets,
Jeroen
PS: preparing food, and devouring it after and during it, is a lot fun,
I suggest you try it one time, so go get your self a kitchensink
.. and lazy IPv6 network operators who simply don't care or even bother
to shut off uncontrolled transit swaps (aka, the legacy hardcore 6bone
styled networks who just won't give in). These folks are better off
not doing ipv6 at all as they are doing nothing but negatively affecting
nearby ASNs It only makes an IPv6-newbie operator to realize how v6
is broken when his peer is leaking his routes everywhere and not willing
to actively fix.
Whether or not IPv6 is the future is up to the sky and I don't know
myself. But, nevertheless, non-usable IPv6 transit service through
irresponsible route-swaps over peering is certainly not helping it
regardless of how many "IPv6 is the future!" meetings, talkshows and
conferences people hold.
James
Fred,
Maybe you're saying that all of the applications you can think of run over IPv4 networks a well as IPv6, and if so you would be correct. As someone else said earlier in the thread, the reason to use IPv6 has to do with addresses,
Oh, you mean the 16 bits of additional address space IPv6 provides? I find it ironic that this is the same amount of address space NAT (eww. I said a bad word) buys you.
not the various issues brought up in the marketing hype.
And yet, we constantly hear the spin of IPv6's "improved security", "simpler routing", etc., etc., when IPv6 fans talk to rooms not full of network geeks. Remember the marketing hype about OSI? Remember the marketing hype about ATM?
The fact that doing so would run the IPv4 address space instantly into the ground wouldn't be a factor would it?
No, actually, it wasn't. Really. I can very honestly say that this was NOT a consideration in how IPv4 address space was allocated to organizations in China, at least when I was at APNIC (if that was the request you were talking about).
Rgds,
-drc
Or, back on topic, remember GOSIP?
Who's the next Milo?
     Sean.
Well, with all due respect, of *course* there isn't any 'killer site'
that is v6 only yet: the only motivation to do so at the moment, given
the proportion of v4 to v6 end-users, is *specifically* to drive v4 to
v6 conversion at the end-user level.
So we're only likely to see that in exactly a case like the government
mandated conversion--mean to say it will likely be some government
internal b-to-b'ish site that crops up first as v6 only, and then the
usual S-curve of conversions amongst other government sites, slowly
dribbling over into b-to-c'ish stuff... which will be what pulls the
rest of us along.
Cheers,
-- jra