IPv6 only from January 2012?Note: Please navigate to this site's home page before submitting a vote. Votes submitted from other pages do not appear to work.
A little draft RFC slipped out of the IETF a month or so ago without attracting a great deal of attention.
An Internet Transition Plan (1)
This memo provides one possible plan for transitioning the Internet from a predominantly IPv4-based connectivity model to a predominantly IPv6-based connectivity model.
It is only a suggestion as the introduction makes clear but it does raise in my mind one of those elephant in the room (2) questions - where's the demand for an all IPv6 Internet?
I just don't see it.
Sure, there's the long standing worry about the exhaustion of the IPv4 address space. Great swathes of hitherto unused space have been allocated to domestic broadband over the past year or so - we know because we see so many unwanted SMTP connections from 90.0.0.0/8 and others (3). But there's more IPv4 left where that came from.
And then there's the combination of RFC1918 with NAT, which means that no organisation of any size, other than network providers, truly needs large numbers of public IP addresses, though a select few still control /8 net blocks and many more have /16 blocks that they will never fully utilise.
IPv6 may well be superior to IPv4 in many ways and is certainly truer to the original Internet vision of universally unambiguous addressability, but if no-one is demanding it, will it ever really happen?
Vote in the sidebar.
- That link will almost certainly disappear within a few months. The IETF has not discovered the concept of permalinks yet.
- Everyone knows it's there and everyone is ignoring it. And sorry, by the way.
- Simple blacklisting hint: Just add [90.*.*.*] to your local blacklist and whitelist any subnets or domains that legitimately use that space to send email (very, very few do - none that I have encountered).
1. Peter von Stöckel11/09/2007 13:25:29
Homepage: http://www.bananahome.com/
Thanks for #3 Chris! My two mail servers are on ADSL broadband connections, with 90.*.*.* IP addresses, which would explain why you don't seem to get any e-mail from me.
2. Chris Linfoot11/09/2007 13:43:04
Are those on static addresses? Do you control DNS for them, or do they have generic w.x.y.z.static.adsl.network.example names? Does your ISP permit the operation of mail servers on its ADSL service? Do they not have an SMTP smarthost that you can route outbound mail through?
And if you use my personal (gmail) address, this will pose you no trouble anyway. It's only if you send to my work address that you may have trouble, though I probably already have your domain whitelisted.
3. Peter von Stöckel11/09/2007 13:48:41
Homepage: http://www.bananahome.com/
They are DHCP addresses, and I don't control reverse DNS for them. They have generic DNS names. I do have to use my ISP's SMTP server as gateway for all outgoing e-mail though. I have to admit that I don't remember which e-mail address I used, I probably just replied to your e-mail, and it was some time ago too. I'll try again... 
4. Chris Linfoot11/09/2007 13:56:24
I do have to use my ISP's SMTP server as gateway for all outgoing e-mail though.
Well, then. There's no problem.
5. Peter von Stöckel11/09/2007 13:58:26
Homepage: http://www.bananahome.com/
E-mail resent to your gmail address.
6. blackhat27/10/2007 05:48:22
Homepage: http://kashi.webhop.net/blog/Technology/
I recently wrote a blog on this subject at <a href=http://kashi.webhop.net/blog/Technology/index.php/archives/16> IPv6: Is it real this time? </a>
This may be real but I just don't see the urgency.
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