Getting Closer To IPv6?
With the recent news that 6 of the 11 root DNS servers now have a native IPv6 address, there’s a feeling amongst some that we might finally be going down the road towards migrating to IPv6. It’s been talked about for years. I’ve been hearing doomsday predictions about the scarcity of the IPv4 address space for at least 15 years now. IPv4 has roughly a 4 billion IP address space–not excluding various blocks not usable by hosts– versus IPv6′s roughly 3.4*1038 IP address space.
The Domain Name System, otherwise known as DNS, is a very important function on the Internet. Without it, people could not translate, say, phoneboy.com, into a usable IP address for a number of different services. If you were on an IPv6 network, you could still resolve DNS names, but packets would have to be sent out over an IPv4 network. Native IPv6 support means that DNS can now operate entirely over IPv6.
Aside from increased address space, IPv6 would essentially eliminate the need for address translation–within the IPv6 network anyway. Some sort of translation might be necessary to reach hosts still on IPv4 only–or for IPv4 hosts to reach IPv6 hosts. However, that would be the exception rather than the norm. Also, IPv6 supports proper point-to-point encryption as part of the standard.
While us geeks are looking forward to IPv6, there’s a lot of infrastructure still on IPv4, and likely will be for the foreseeable future. The process will likely take another decade or more. By then, most of our computers, routers, and networking equipment should be IPv6 ready. I hope. 
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Tags: dns, ipv6, networking Fnord
Comment by spg
IPv6 will eliminate a lot of headaches with protocols like SIP getting around NAT firewalls, etc. but lets hope that as the ISPs, cell carriers(who will likely be one of the main pipes into the net in 10 years) and the backbone operators do not put no obstacles in place as they upgrade. without net neutrality IPv6 could actually be more of a problem and a help in that the backbone operators and ISP will be able to identify far more about what is connected to you IP connection and throttle as they see fit.
Comment by PhoneBoy
@spg NAT makes stuff worse, but then again, protocol designers are stupid for not taking the reality of NAT into account.
Then again, with IPSec as part of the standard, “filtering” content might be a lot harder.
Comment by Derek Morr
There are far, far more than 11 DNS root servers. There are closer to 130. ICANN has a nice write up it – http://blog.icann.org/?p=235
I agree that having IPv6 in the DNS root is very important. However, organizations have been deploying IPv6 for years before this announcement.
Comment by PhoneBoy
@derek wouldn’t deployment of a major Internet service like DNS indicate progress on IPv6 adoption?
Comment by Derek Morr
Yes, having IPv6 in the DNS root is a very important step forward for IPv6 deployment. I just wanted to point out that it doesn’t preclude organizations from deploying IPv6 themselves, and running IPv6 on their own authoritative name servers.
Comment by PhoneBoy
@derek of course it doesn’t preclude it, but it makes it a little bit easier to jump on the bandwagon now.
Comment by My Ip Address
In the IPv4 world, RIPv2 [RFC2453], the integrated IS-IS [RFC1195], and OSPFv2 [RFC2328] are commonly deployed unicast routing protocols in networks of small to middle scale such as enterprise environments, while BGP-4 [RFC4271] is the common routing protocol deployed among large organizations such as Internet Service Providers (ISPs).
In general, since the routing concept is identical between IPv4 and IPv6, these routing protocols have been naturally extended to support IPv6. Even though the packet formats may have changed, the principles remain largely the same.
But there are IPv6 specific issues. In particular, most IPv6 routing protocols rely heavily on link-local addresses since communication using these addresses is stable in terms of routing, thanks to their limited scope.
On the other hand, the ambiguity of link-local addresses requires special care in implementing these protocols. It is therefore important to understand the details of the protocols and how they should be implemented even for those who are familiar with IPv4 routing protocols.