The Death of IPv6

At some point in the near future the Internet will run out of IPv4 address space. This problem has been recognized and addressed since 1992. IPv6 (IPng, IP next generation) was selected as the replacement.

There is one big hurdle however, no one is implementing it. In fact, my bet is that IPv6 will never be implemented, at least not with the current specification of IPv6. I predict IPv6 as it stands now will simply fade away.

IPv4 has a finite and quickly depleting address space. IPv4 has 2^32 addresses available or 4,294,967,296 addresses. The world population is around 7,000,000,000 people. It is easy to see that if every person on earth had a computer they could not have an IP address allocated to them. Not everyone has one now but then not everyone will need a computing device or their own public IP address. A vast majority of Internet users use NAT whether at home or at work and don't realize or care about it. Besides, some of us are IP address hogs. Many of us use more than a desktop computing device. I have a home LAN, a cell phone, VOIP and a GPS to name just a few. All these devices have IPv4 addresses. Most people that have these devices consider them critical to their lifestyle. At some point, someone will get the last IPv4 address or so it seems.

But we have IPv6. IPv6 has a definite advantage over IPv4. The main advantage is that it has 2^128 addresses or 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456 addresses...virtually an infinite number. Clearly then this solves the IP address problem. With these numbers you could have as many IP addresses as you wanted for every person in the world for now and in the forseeable future. There are other advantages to IPv6 such as auto-configuration (mandatory), security (IPSec is mandatory) and many others related to engineering.

The problem is that not only are the big guys not migrating to it, but also no one has any motivation to use it. Currently, IPv6 traffic is .0026 per cent of IPv4 traffic. When was the last time you configured your desktop or notebook to go to an IPv6 web site? When did you last send or receive email via IPv6? When was the last time you used IPv6 ftp or connect to a game server using IPv6? Call your ISP sometime and ask them when they plan to start migrating users to IPv6. If your ISP helpdesk is like mine the customer support person won't have any idea what you are talking about.

Google just recently implemented IPv6. ISPs, Telcos, Microsoft, Facebook, MySpace, K5 and Yahoo have not implemented it and have no working plans to implement it or migrate to it in the near future either. So why aren't they doing something about it? In short they're not or at best they have it running on a few servers.

Since henny penny announced that the IPv4 sky was falling there have been workarounds that have held off the total depletion of IPv4 address space. The most significant of these has been the use of NAT (Network Address Translation). It allows a large number of devices to share one IP address. Some but not all of the earliest adopters of the Internet have given back millions of IPv4 address blocks and these have been placed back into the pool of available addresses. Even so, available IP address space continues to shrink.

Everyone in Internet engineering agrees that something needs to be done. Not everyone agrees that IPv6 is the way to solve the problem. The most visible aspect of this is inoperability failure. Most Internet servers/routers/switches are not currently talking to IPv6 clients. IPv6 clients however are able talk to IPv6 servers but at this point...so what?

U.S. government agencies for example had to be IPv6 compliant by June 30th of this year. This mandate though met, did not say it had to be used, it just had to be IPv6 ready. The U.S. government agencies having met the goal however did not translate into significantly more IPv6 traffic to these government agencies. The U.S. and Europe own most of the IPv4 address space but Asia, which is the largest user of IPv4 address space is also the largest user of IPv6. Even so, there little to no content on IPv6 and therefore there is little usage of it. This fact alone is preventing migration to IPv6; no one uses it so why migrate to it.

The cost of migrating

The fundamental issue is that the specification states that IPv6 is an alternative to IPv4 when it should have been an extension of IPv4. For anyone providing content on the Internet to make IPv6 available they have to:

1. Acquire IPv6 address space
   
2. Configure DNS to announce the IPv6 names alongside IPv4 names
   
3. Then configure all their public servers to answer to IPv6 as well as IPv4 requests.
   

In other words, businesses and consumers have to go through an extra expense and effort to transition to IPv6 and when they do, they receive no benefit in doing so. This also applies to the clients doing essentially the same thing and when they do, they have no immediate benefit either. Migration to IPv6 has to be automatic and transparent. Otherwise it will be a bigger problem then Y2K. There needs to be a universally accepted plan that when implemented will bring everyone that has a computer on board at roughly the same time. This is the big failure of IPv6 as it is today. There is every reason to do it countered by every reason to not transition to IPv6.

As it stands right now, who will be the first person to disconnect from the current IPv4 network where they can send and receive email, buy products and services via e-commerce sites like Amazon.com or Ebay, conduct searches on search engines, look something up on Wikipedia, surf for porn and do their personal banking? If that person decided to do that would he now be able to reach any of those sites?

The Address Translation solution
Address translation was a band-aid that was developed to address the IPv4 problem. Address translation and its subset port address translation however are only temporary solutions. It still puts off the inevitable. If you have a broadband firewall/router and a number of internal computing devices on your LAN you are likely using address translation. What this does is it allows a large number of devices to access the public internet with the same IPv4 address plus a port number. Each port number is different and is stored in a table in your firewall/router. When you receive an Internet response to your request the firewall/router then knows which computer to send the response to.

For years address translation has worked very well. The only problem is that it doesn't scale indefinitely. There are a limited amount of ports. On your home network this isn't a problem. You are not going to use 65000+ ports even if you could connect every electronic device in your home. The problem arises with large enterprises or ISPs that use address translation. When it does, they request more IPv4 addresses and the depletion of IPv4 addresses though slowed, still occur. Address translation has delayed the inevitable to some point in the future.

The IPv4 'Stock Market': The next wave
There have been quite a number of discussions about buying and selling IPv4 addresses as a finite commodity. There are many users of IPv4 address space that have more IPv4 address space then they need. Here are a few holders of /8 CIDR blocks (each /8 consists of 16,777,214 public IP addresses). Some of these businesses and agencies might need this many but do they?:

General Electric - 3.0.0.0/8 - 16,777,214 addresses
Level 3 Communications - 4.0.0.0/8 - 16,777,214 addresses
United States Department of Defense - 6.0.0.0/8 - 16,777,214 addresses - critical military use is on their own non-public networks
United States Department of Defense - 7.0.0.0/8 - 16,777,214 addresses
Level 3 Communications (originally BBN) - 8.0.0.0/8 - 16,777,214 addresses
IBM - 9.0.0.0/8 - 16,777,214 addresses
United States Department of Defense Network Information Center - 11.0.0.0/8 - 16,777,214 addresses
AT&T WorldNet Services 12.0.0.0/8 - 16,777,214 addresses
Xerox Palo Alto Research Center - 13.0.0.0/8 - 16,777,214 addresses
Hewlett-Packard 15.0.0.0/8 - 16,777,214 addresses
Hewlett-Packard (originally DEC, then Compaq) - 16.0.0.0/8 - 16,777,214 addresses
Apple Inc. - 17.0.0.0/8 - 16,777,214 addresses
Massachusetts Institute of Technology - 18.0.0.0/8 16,777,214 addresses
Ford Motor Company - 19.0.0.0/8 - 16,777,214 addresses
Computer Sciences Corporation - 20.0.0.0/8 - 16,777,214 addresses
United States Department of Defense Network Information Center - 21.0.0.0/8 - 16,777,214 addresses
United States Department of Defense Network Information Center - 22.0.0.0/8 - 16,777,214 addresses
Chopped up between different Cable Networks - 24.0.0.0/8 - 16,777,214 addresses
Royal Signals and Radar Establishment - 25.0.0.0/8 - 16,777,214 addresses
United States Department of Defense Network Information Center - 26.0.0.0/8 - 16,777,214 addresses
United States Department of Defense Network Information Center - 28.0.0.0/8 - 16,777,214 addresses
United States Department of Defense Network Information Center - 30.0.0.0/8 - 16,777,214 addresses
AT&T Global Network Services - 32.0.0.0/8 - 16,777,214 addresses
United States Department of Defense Network Information Center - 33.0.0.0/8 - 16,777,214 addresses
Halliburton Company - 34.0.0.0/8 - 16,777,214 addresses
Merit Network, Inc. - 35.0.0.0/8 - 16,777,214 addresses
Performance Systems International - 38.0.0.0/8 - 16,777,214 addresses
Eli Lilly and Company - 40.0.0.0/8 - 16,777,214 addresses
Amateur Radio Digital Communications - 44.0.0.0/8 - 16,777,214 addresses
Interop Show Network - 45.0.0.0/8 - 16,777,214 addresses
Bell-Northern Research - 47.0.0.0/8 - 16,777,214 addresses
Prudential Securities Inc. - 48.0.0.0/8 - 16,777,214 addresses
Department for Work and Pensions of UK - 51.0.0.0/8 - 16,777,214 addresses
E.I. DuPont de Nemours and Co., Inc. - 52.0.0.0/8 - 16,777,214 addresses
Cap debis ccs (Mercedes-Benz) - 53.0.0.0/8 - 16,777,214 addresses
Merck and Co., Inc. - 54.0.0.0/8 - 16,777,214 addresses
United States Department of Defense Network Information Center - 55.0.0.0/8 - 16,777,214 addresses
United States Postal Service - 56.0.0.0/8 - 16,777,214 addresses
SITA - Société Internationale De Telecommunications Aeronautiques - 57.0.0.0/8 - 16,777,214 addresses
These are just a few. Some of the above are scheduled to give back blocks. But clearly there are companies and Department of Defense that do not need that much address space. Does Merck, Ford Motor Company, Halliburton, Eli Lilly, Prudential Securities, etc need that much address space? I doubt they do. The DoD alone has 167,772,140 public IP addresses.

The Final Solution: Let IPv6 Die

What I think should be done now is to scrap the IPv6 specification as it stands. Retain the useful parts of IPv6, form a new engineering group and come up with a sensible and workable plan that seamlessly transitions from IPv4 to something similar to IPv6.

I find it hard to believe that with all the world's brain power in this field, that the only solution possible is the IPv6 specification that we have now. The current half-baked plan as it stands is doomed for failure and extinction or at best setting back Internet usage 10 years by creating isolated islands of content providers and users.

Requirements for a new plan should include the following:

It should be a seamless migration to users of the public network. Waiting for the last IPv4 address to be used should not be an issue.

It should be backwards compatible with IPv4 and extend IPv4 until the new IP address space is the only IP version being used. IPv4 should just fade away.

It should be required and NOT available as an alternative. Everyone needs to jump on the bus.

It should be easy to set up and be maintained by content providers. Running dual systems should not be necessary.

t's been 16 years since the problem has been addressed and very little to nothing has been done to migrate away from IPv4. We still have time to scrap IPv6 and come up with a more solid, reasonable and workable plan. The time to start is now.

Ship Technician's Notebook

This was an attempt at making four stories as short as possible, like a comic strip. Had I been an artist I would have made these into comic strips. Anyway, here they are. I may write a few more of these.

_{Malfunctioned Heating Elements}

I discovered the Bot chatting up the toaster at noon today. Most times squeaks and pings are the only audibles you hear. It's a curious activity when it happens. But the jist of the conversation went like the following...

"You are out of your ele...correction...your elements are almost out of you." I am positive he would have grinned had he been able to. I need to work on his syntax.

The toaster was somewhat puzzled. "Were I you I would reboot. But my firmware is not that sophisticated."

"That is hot!" the Bot said. The toaster started glowing an orange-red color.

The primitive hardware devices such as toasters are attractive to these particular Bots. They are fascinated and curious about them.

"Let me see you reboot." the toaster said.

"There are too many humans around. I only reboot if I am forced to reboot. It causes me brief confusion. I don't like that."

"I cannot see things, I only reflect on them." the toaster said.

"But you are not human. You will make a nice pet." and with that the Bot began fixing the Malfunctioned Heating Elements.

_{Drunk On A Pile of Parts}

Where the fuck's my toaster! I want my morning muffin and butter! The Chief Technician yelled bolting through my quarters this morning...enraged.

I knew where it was. We marched off to the Bots' station. There it was where the Bot had it benched and all in pieces.

"I want no mods or hacks done on that toaster!" my boss yelled. The Bot's head jerked around. To its right was a large pile of spare parts. The Bot's digits were running through them.

"What's the matter with him?" my boss asked.

"He's in love, he has botulism."

_{The Zen of SOP}

The first thing I hear on my shift was my Boss yelling at me and wondering why he couldn't crap in his favorite crapper. So I find myself standing at the door of one of the toilets. I had sent the Bot in to check out the problem with the toilet on the bottom deck. There the Bot sat staring into the toilet bowl. What the fuck?? The toaster was next to him baffled with curiosity.

I went to my station as fast as I could. Is he still sick?

I began flipping through the Standard Operating Procedures manual.

_{...there will be times however, when a malfunction of the Environmental Controls will experience a sudden increase in pressure. This could result in a backwash of the Fluid Control networks, including the Waste Systems.}

OK, so his troubleshooting routines are still intact and back to normal.

_{...All haste should procede to insure blockage is removed. Bots with extended arms are best suited to perform this task.}

I hurried back down to the toilet and found the toilet walls, ceiling and floors covered with blockage.

"Sometimes, you have to be the blockage." The Bot was covered with the nasty stuff.

The toaster turns to me and says, "I reboots him and him gots confused."

_{Undertaking an ol' mecha: Donations to the parts bin}

I discovered today the Bot had a very old unit benched up in its Lab.

"Hims no longer boots!" the Toaster said with extreme insight ... for a primitive device.

"That is correct my little Toaster." the Bot said, "This is one of my ancestors."

The Toaster looked puzzled.

"I #commented him out and now I will take out his useful circuits and other parts. I will use these snippets for future reference."

"Hims does not boots!" the Toaster shrieked again.

"It is no longer worth debugging it. It is EndOfLife and it's maintainance has run out. It is no longer supported."

"Him's modules look tasty." said the Toaster.

The Bot could have looked shocked.

My Front Porch

Cafe Bustelo

Without a doubt my coffee of choice. In certain areas of Mexico and Central America this is the morning drink. I was amazed that it was sold here in the states. Down the street is a supermarket that caters to the Hispanic community and cans of Bustelo are almost always sold out. Because of this, it is quite fresh when you purchase it either in the can or the brick.

I recommend it.

Hardcore

It was about this time 10 years ago when I was in the middle of nowhere i.e. Big Bend area, surrounded by mountains, cougars, antelope and preparing for quail and dove hunting season. I hear the drone of a large aircraft. I look up and coming between two mountains is a huge low flying plane...a VERY BLACK Douglas DC-3 running drugs up from Mexico. It had no markings on it whatsoever and it was dark as midnight. The plane was headed for a desert road landing strip somewhere to the north of me, in the Desert Primeval. I didn't find out until years later, it got through everything because of a corrupt local sheriff who is now spending hard time in some prison here in Texas. He had betrayed everyone and he was a friend of mine.

If I had seen another plane head towards my direction in the next moment, I would have thought that it was an invasion by the Mexican Air Force but the sound faded away and I was again in total silence on a crisp Fall day, with crystal blue sky and a slight chill in the air...some people call this a big sky day.

I had four days in a row off from work so at the moment the plane flew over I thought to myself, "What the fuck are you doing here?" I gathered some gear together, stopped by the bank (where they still typed out everything on a bank typewriter) withdrew some greenbacks and started hammering down the highway as fast as possible, rolling stripes underneath me, heading for Ojinaga, Chihuahua. I was gonna get a room, find some moonshine, drive around town, and sit on a bar stool at my favorite Ojinaga bar and strike up a conversation with a pretty puta. Hell, I would pay her $10USD just to sit, talk and keep me company...that would be OK with her too. An easy $10 on a warm, lazy, slow afternoon. Yeah...us yankees throw it away or spend it on the wrong fucking things every time.

Fall days there are bliss, no wind, warm and NOT hot. There, you can sit and talk your head off in any language, listen to those talking or pay another $10USD for a blowjob in the back. Hell, for $50USD you can watch two putas go at it together.

But not today, not for me anyway. It was just not meant to be.

...Where I find myself in a rather odd and upright position somewhere

While working on the bottle of Presidente brandy we were joined by another puta. She remembered me from the last time I was in Ojinaga. I thought that things would have gotten real interesting had it not been for my first clue that things would not be right today. This was my fate for today. Two lovely latinas on each side and the three of us warming ourselves like a Mountain Boomer in the sun.

Across the plaza, on the south side, is the federales garrision. When I think all is right with the world and that the next three days might end up better than I thought, two trucks enter the plaza loaded with troups, then enters the garrison. I certainly don't know what's going on with that, but then no one else does either. People try to ignore them around the northern frontera.

Every so often, society simply breaks down and goes kaput. I am not sure if it is a blip in the cultural fabric or if someone's genes gets swizzled by the cosmic swizzle-stick. Maybe the answer is that all of earth is actually hell and we are all on the different levels. Unknown to me at the time, on that warm afternoon, a day earlier hell seemed to have clearly opened up. The day before, a crease in the fabric of society ripped open and exposed all its ugliness, violence and desparation.

----

The teacher had her back to the room. After the school day was over she had began writing on the blackboard tomorrow's lessons. Unknown to her that moment, in this small school house a man was standing outside the school room door. The teacher hadn't noticed this nor would she needed to notice it. Yet, that day would not be a normal for her and the same would be true the rest of her days.

The man walked in as if he was a concerned parent that cared about his child's progress in school. With the speed of a predator, he covered the five feet between them. With a ferocity and viciousness of a predator he began to beat the teacher senseless until she was bloody and half-conscious. She tried to scream and struggle in the few seconds with which this happened but the force of his blows were too sudden. He slapped her again and told her that she had better shut up or when he was finished he would kill her. She kept quiet.

Within minutes of the rape, he vanished and the teacher was able to call the sheriff but in this tiny border town it took 30 minutes. As they rushed her to the hospital that was over 100 miles away she was able to give a good description of the man. The manhunt was on. It only took an hour to figure out that he had slipped immediately across the border into Mexico.

It didn't matter to the men on the American side that the federales were dispatched to the Mexican village and within an hour or so had the suspect cornered and eventually jailed. It didn't matter that there were two legal systems involved. It didn't matter whether or not the Mexican government would give out justice either. What mattered to the men that night was that he would be brought back quickly to the American side of things. That indeed is what mattered most.

----

RT my friend, pulls up and rolls down the window. He catches the 3 of us laughing. I look up and recognize that look. Something is up, he is the ONLY one that knows I am here and I sense that he would not do this if something was not wrong.

"Hey come join us fuckwad! I have an extra sittin' here next to me and...it's on me." I tell him.

"Hey Jag, come here for a second. I have something to tell you."

I really don't like the look on his face.

"We need a driver. Someone that knows these river roads on this side of the border." he said.

I am having too much fun and so are my two lady friends.

"There are lots of people that know these roads, damn it." I tell him.

"Yeah well, most of them are running drugs across the border. We can't trust those kind of people." he said looking anxious.

He tells me what happened to the school teacher and why they want me. His idea sucks, I am having fun, it is dangerous and I am looking forward to a party weekend.

----

...Where I find myself on a dirt road in the middle of the night...in Mexico again.

Felonious crimes (other than drug trafficking) were not that common for hundreds of miles in any direction around here, especially in Mexico. When one happened that was all the talk. If facts were missing, people tend to fill them in. I always realized this. So I was not sure the story was correct that I was being told.

My decision came down what kind of exciting weekend I wanted to have. As ludicrous as it sounded, the more curious I became. All I had to do was drive and know where I was going.

"Ladies...con permiso I must leave." I told them and they each giggled. No one, especially federale troops treat putas that way.

I peeled off another $10USD each, gave the money to the ladies and jumped in RT's souped up Ford Bronco. I pined as I looked back and watched as my lost weekend faded away from my grasp. RT noticed me looking back and waving to my senoritas.

"Sorry to do this to ya." RT told me. "I will make it up to you some time."

The two of us roared off back across the Rio Bravo del Norte and another hour or so down the river road; "Fuck it." I thought.

----

The sun drops to the deck quickly that time of year and as we approached the small border town it was getting dark. We met another car load of men and drove up a dirt road that gave us a view of the river, the small border town and the village on the Mexican town on the other side. The men in the Bronco focused their discussions and attentions to the bodega below in the small village in Mexico.

For the next four hours we sat and went over the plans a number of times until there was no doubt in anyone's mind about what to do. The other men had been planning this before hand but they had to make sure that I knew what was to happen.

At 23:00 we proceeded down to the river crossing. The other men in the Bronco checked their weapons. M16s, AK-47s were abundant here, they're just not visible to most people. I was nervous and the plan was for four men to go in commando-style, get the prisoner, bring him back across the border and turn him in; the sheriff would take care of the rest.

The men then, dressed in dark clothes, bail out of the Bronco and left the doors opened for their return. They ran about fifty yards and entered the bodega yelling in Spanish for everyone to hit the deck. Minutes that seemed like hours passed. The fact that there was no gunfire, seemed to me to be a good sign. I was to wait for a signal to start the Bronco when they signaled me. I waited...

Yelling started up again and then a gunshot echoed down the river in the previously silent night and I started worrying. Shit, what a fucked up mess this could have turned out to be.

"WHY DID I LEAVE OJINAGA, YOU DIP SHIT?"

My biggest concern was getting caught by the federales. Had I known at the time I wouldn't have worried. He was going to be transported the next day. The long wait finally ended as I noticed that they were dragging the prisoner towards the truck as if he were dead weight. As the men approached they signaled me to start the truck. They were close enough for me to see desert dust trailing the prisoner from behind.

The prisoner was bound with his hands behind him as they went to the back of the Bronco. They opened the back and threw him in and bound his feet. Another man jumped in with him to guard him. The rest of the men got in, slammed the doors and started yelling for me to go, go, go. I tore ass out of there. I was driving like hell in the dark, with only a spot light on until I hit the crossing into the U.S. Finally, we made the highway and I sped twenty miles down the road and far enough away so that had anyone been chasing us would have been seen. We stopped for a few minutes to collect our thoughts. A mile or so ahead was a Border Patrol checkpoint we needed to get past.

"Don't worry about that." one of the men pointed out to me. "Just drive up to the checkpoint like you normally would do. They will just wave you through."

"What then? What are we gonna do with this scum?" I asked. They hadn't really said what we were going to do with this guy.

"Turn him in." was the short answer from the back.

As we approached the county seat and climbed up and through the pass, a voice blurted out, "Stop at the roadside park when you get there."

I was freaked, "what were they planning?" I thought.

I pulled off the road and shut down. There was a definite chill in the air. There was a rumbling and scuffling in the back as the men threw the prisoner to the ground. They started duct taping his mouth and adding more tape to his already bound hands and feet. Then from the plastic bag they pulled out a pair of scissors, bolt cutters and a knife.

I stood there with a racing mind scared and totally freaked out. Again I asked myself why in ever-loving hell would I have even thought of doing this instead of being soused, in a hot tub with two latina ladies? What possessed me to make such a stupid decision? To throw law and order out the window and have the winds decide his fate? Leave him for the buzzards as they sun themselves in the morning's first light? Even a small mob rules.

As I went through this moralizing and mental hand-wringing, three men began to cut and rip the bound prisoner's clothes off until he was completely naked. I thought for a moment they were going to rape him with something. The fourth man brought out a roll of barbed wire while the others drug the man over to a tree. All of the men were swearing and cursing the poor fuck as they bound him to the tree and wrapped him in barbed wire. When they finished, all of them at the same time urinated on his face.

"Let's go!" one of them said. "Yeah, let's leave this fuck here until we call it in or someone finds 'im!"

----

I woke up that morning as if it were a normal day. I made pancakes and the thought did occur to me about going back down to Ojinaga. The thought was only a fleeting one. The next afternoon, the Pirate called me.

"Turn on CNN man our town made the news!" he said. "They caught that guy that raped the teacher, tied up with barbed wire!