IPv6 has No Business Case, Survey Finds

Terry Olaes

Terry Olaes

I Used to be the [H] News Guy
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The Internet Society (ISOC) surveyed network operators and found that there is no current business incentive to move to IPv6, according to NetworkWorld. However, customer demand is rising and respondents are still planning their IPv6 deployments. I’ve disabled IPv6 in Vista since I have no use for it yet. Are you using IPv6 at all?

IPv6 deployment remains spotty, even for organizations committed to the technology, the survey found. When asked how they were deploying IPv6, a little over half said they were deploying IPv6 on parts of their network rather than their whole network. Several respondents said they envision parts of their networks never operating with IPv6.
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I left IPv6 enabled on all my Vista/2008 installs since it doesn't seem to negatively affect me. My pfsense router/DHCP server doesn't support IPv6 anyway.
 
I have IPv6 running on my local home network just because I got hella bored one weekend.
 
Its a potential security hole as there hasnt been much use of it and therefore a lack of reported incidents.
Like anything new, its likely to be insecure.
I have it disabled it on any Vista machines I deploy.
 
IPv6 is hella confusing as well. 128bit Hex addresses are nice and all as there are alot of them, but no IT admin wants to deploy and to a extent memorize giant octet addresses. There are shortcuts were you can substitute colons but that can only go so far... I just dont even see it picking up with NAT still holding its own.
 
Lazy_Moron said:
IPv6 is hella confusing as well. 128bit Hex addresses are nice and all as there are alot of them, but no IT admin wants to deploy and to a extent memorize giant octet addresses. There are shortcuts were you can substitute colons but that can only go so far... I just dont even see it picking up with NAT still holding its own.
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You're not kidding. Some things I need to do requires me to memorize IP addresses: logging into server remote desktop, setting up VPN and so on. I memorized the IP addresses of all 7 of our servers in addition to our VPN firewalls and NAT router. If they were IPv6, I would have to write them down and keep it in my wallet all the time (or jot it down on my Blackberry).
 
Azhar said:
You're not kidding. Some things I need to do requires me to memorize IP addresses: logging into server remote desktop, setting up VPN and so on. I memorized the IP addresses of all 7 of our servers in addition to our VPN firewalls and NAT router. If they were IPv6, I would have to write them down and keep it in my wallet all the time (or jot it down on my Blackberry).
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the thing is with IPv6 you dont NEED to remember the address it self every IPv6 box would its own name like "my server1" or some thing on the network and you would just use that

no need to remember its ip
 
Nenu said:
Its a potential security hole as there hasnt been much use of it and therefore a lack of reported incidents.
Like anything new, its likely to be insecure.
I have it disabled it on any Vista machines I deploy.
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...how is a protocol a "potential security hole"?
 
finalgt said:
...how is a protocol a "potential security hole"?
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becouse its open to the world with some routers and the smucks that dont use any kind if fire wall leave there ipv6 open for all to see and maybe sharing files on it and not even know
 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_address_exhaustion

NAT won't be able to prevent this permanently. Not at all. NAT is imperfect

address pools will be exhausted within a few years, especially with the popularity of mobile devices and upcoming (3-5 years) 4G phones (which will make use of IP).

also, IPv6 enabled machines don't necessarily have to use DHCPv6. they can assign themselves with their own IP by using their MAC address. so memorize your machine's mac address and then a few extra characters and voila

not being able to memorize IPv6 addresses easily is not a good enough reason to not implement IPv6
 
finalgt said:
...how is a protocol a "potential security hole"?
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There have already been numerous protocol related security blunders so new IPv6 DNS servers (for example) are likely to have their own teething problems.
ie a number of DNS cache poisoning techniques for IPv4 have been used/patched.
There are many more attack vectors than DNS server cache too.
 
You'll eventually be forced to switch (probably due to IPv4 address exhaustion), but there's no need to switch before then, IMO.
 
It's inevitable that IPv6 will be deployed on all internet facing network adapters...

I just don't see it ever being deployed on LAN's and Intranets anytime soon. No one company has that many computers.
 
We don't use it... We are CIDRed 10. and still have many years of IPs left.

Don't know anyone using it.

Can't really see a business case for using it. (Public IPs for phones? Why?)
 
I still use IPv4 as some other people say, no need for it now. Im not surprised about it too :)
 
I still use IPv4 at home. My router can support IPv6 but I'm too lazy to move to IPv6 as it doesn't do me any good right now. Although there have been a few days where it's been tempting to switch just to play with it.

IPv6 will be used eventually but not until we run out of IPv4.
 
Lazy_Moron said:
IPv6 is hella confusing as well. 128bit Hex addresses are nice and all as there are alot of them, but no IT admin wants to deploy and to a extent memorize giant octet addresses. There are shortcuts were you can substitute colons but that can only go so far... I just dont even see it picking up with NAT still holding its own.
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That, and not to mention remembering those stupid shortcuts is even more confusing!

Frankly, NAT with more powerful routers is a solid enough solution to keep us going for a while longer. IPv6 has its place, but it's still WAY too immature to be readily deployed.
 
I'm using ipv6, sort of. I'm using a tunnel broker to get free Usenet access.

I wish I knew more about networking.
 
If these damn companies would be forced to turn over their Class A IP address blocks, we'd have plenty of IPv4 address space left. For example, why the hell does Eli Lily & Company need an entire Class A block? Instead of using NAT and private addresses, they use routable IPs for everything, including stuff that will NEVER access the Internet.
 
I'm not using IPv6, but I've left it enabled on my Vista computer, anyway. I don't disable things for the hell of it. If it's not causing me any security or performance problems (and I don't believe IPv6 is), I'll leave it enabled. That way, when I finally need it, I won't have to worry about it.

Also, Vista's Remote Assistance feature, which I occasionally use as a replacement for NetMeeting, uses IPv6 (Teredo).
 
It's the sort of thing that everybody and every bit of hardware and software should support, so there's a solid base when we have to start switching. I suspect there'll be years with a lot of computers using the same IPv4 and 6 designation, and newer devices will gradually become IPv6 only.
 
digitalfreak said:
If these damn companies would be forced to turn over their Class A IP address blocks, we'd have plenty of IPv4 address space left. For example, why the hell does Eli Lily & Company need an entire Class A block? Instead of using NAT and private addresses, they use routable IPs for everything, including stuff that will NEVER access the Internet.
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Haha true. Apparently MIT has a large excess of IPv4 addresses reserved which it isn't using. There are probably some complicated politics behind giving up already-reserved IP addresses.
 
djBon2112 said:
Frankly, NAT with more powerful routers is a solid enough solution to keep us going for a while longer. IPv6 has its place, but it's still WAY too immature to be readily deployed.
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Unfortunately "a while" is only about 2 years until IANA is down to its last 5 /8 blocks that will be divvied up to regional registries, of which those are estimated to last until sometime in late 2012. As of today the IPv4 block pool is about 87% exhausted. IPv6 is not without its kinks today, but NAT isn't going to band-aid the problem much longer.
 
p4gs said:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_address_exhaustion

NAT won't be able to prevent this permanently. Not at all. NAT is imperfect

address pools will be exhausted within a few years, especially with the popularity of mobile devices and upcoming (3-5 years) 4G phones (which will make use of IP).

also, IPv6 enabled machines don't necessarily have to use DHCPv6. they can assign themselves with their own IP by using their MAC address. so memorize your machine's mac address and then a few extra characters and voila

not being able to memorize IPv6 addresses easily is not a good enough reason to not implement IPv6
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Per your own linked article:
"The transition of the Internet to IPv6 is the only practical and readily available long-term solution to IPv4 address exhaustion."

Note that NAT can very well continue to provide plenty of addresses to internal networks, especially if on a Class A subnet. IPv6 is needed for outside INTERNET addresses, as the plethora of pr0n sites have all but used them up. For internal use, NAT is just fine.

Now, IPv6 has a great many improved features over IPv4, such as:

IPv6 hosts can configure themselves automatically when connected to a routed IPv6 network using ICMPv6 router discovery messages.

IPSec support is mandatory in IPv6

A number of simplifications have been made to the packet header, and the process of packet forwarding has been simplified, in order to make packet processing by routers simpler and hence more efficient.

IPv4 has a fixed size (40 bytes) of option parameters. In IPv6, options are implemented as additional extension headers after the IPv6 header, which limits their size only by the size of an entire packet.

IPv4 limits packets to 64 KB of payload. IPv6 has optional support for packets over this limit, referred to as jumbograms, which can be as large as 4 GiB. The use of jumbograms may improve performance over high-MTU networks.

The most important of these is the integrated IPsec, thereby making it a more secure protocol out of the box.
 
I have IPv6 enabled on my "network" (between my Windows 7 laptop and desktop at school) for HomeGroup functionality. My router also supports IPv6 (I think, DD-WRT did but I'm not sure about Tomato).
 
Careful though, some routers simply pass IPv6 without security.
 
I thought IPv6 was to solve the IP/Mac crunch that we're about to see on the interwebz.

There's no reason to go to it inside your internal work network IMO.
 
Azhar said:
You're not kidding. Some things I need to do requires me to memorize IP addresses: logging into server remote desktop, setting up VPN and so on. I memorized the IP addresses of all 7 of our servers in addition to our VPN firewalls and NAT router. If they were IPv6, I would have to write them down and keep it in my wallet all the time (or jot it down on my Blackberry).
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This, I'd never remember all the addresses I have memorized now as IPv6. No point to migrate yet.
 
I think IPv6 went a little overboard with the size of the addresses. 128 bits is too much to memorize. We could have just gone with 64 bits and that would have been fine.
 
tdg said:
Unfortunately "a while" is only about 2 years until IANA is down to its last 5 /8 blocks that will be divvied up to regional registries, of which those are estimated to last until sometime in late 2012. As of today the IPv4 block pool is about 87% exhausted. IPv6 is not without its kinks today, but NAT isn't going to band-aid the problem much longer.
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This:

digitalfreak said:
If these damn companies would be forced to turn over their Class A IP address blocks, we'd have plenty of IPv4 address space left. For example, why the hell does Eli Lily & Company need an entire Class A block? Instead of using NAT and private addresses, they use routable IPs for everything, including stuff that will NEVER access the Internet.
Click to expand...

So many addresses are wasted that there's no compelling reason to move to the new standard. Just free up some of these addresses.
 
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