Tag: IPv4

IPv6 Launch Day Saw Over 3,000 Companies Make The Switch

June 6, 2012 will be remembered among those of us who love the Internet as World IPv6 Launch Day. It was a pretty momentous occasion that went unnoticed by most mainstream media (but we covered it). The move was required to allow the Internet to grow even larger than it was under IPv4. While the numbers of those who have switched is still relatively low, it’s going to keep growing.

Now that it’s been a few weeks since the launch of IPv6, the fine people over at World IPv6 Launch have thrown together an infographic that explains the importance of IPv6 and which companies have made the switch so far.

As you all probably know by now, IPv4 was pretty much tapped and has been for the past few years. According to estimates, the Asia Pacific region ran out of IPv4 addresses back in April 2011 and Europe was going to run out in August of this year. Something needed to be done and IPv6 was the answer.

IPv6 is pretty amazing because it greatly expands upon the amount of IP addresses that are available to us compared to IPv4. IPv4 only had 4.3 billion IP addresses where as IPv6 has 340 undecillion (that’s 38 zeroes) IP addresses. To put that into even better perspective, that’s 4.3 billion IP addresses for every star in the known universe.

So who’s using all those IP addresses? During the launch on June 6, over 3,000 Web sites took the charge to make the switch. Some of these companies include AOL, Bing, Facebook, Google, Mozilla, NASA, Netflix and others. On top of all of those companies, 65 network operators including AT&T, Comcast, Time Warner and others all made the switch. For consumers, five home router vendors – Cisco, D-Link, NEC Access, Yahama and Zyxel – updated their hardware to be IPv6 compliant.

More and more Web sites and companies will begin deploying IPv6 over the coming months and years. It will soon usurp IPv4 and become the new standard to which we connect to the Internet on. Once we reach that milestone, it will be a day just as important, if not more, than June 6, 2012.

June 18, 2012
Microsoft Details IPv6 Support In Windows 8

As you are most likely already aware, IPv6 launched today. It will slowly become the standard at which we connect to the Internet, but IPv4 is still going to be around for a while. Microsoft has been one of the major players in the transition and is making Windows 8 one of the most IPv6-friendly services out there.

To help facilitate the move to IPv6, Microsoft has made Windows 8 compatible with all three forms of IP networks – IPv4, IPv6 and dual-stack. On IPv4-only networks, Windows 8 will use a technology called Teredo that translates IPv6 packets into IPv4 packets. This will be especially helpful for those trying to access networks that are exclusively on IPv6.

The most common form of network that we’re probably going to see over the next few years is the dual-stack network. IPv4 and IPv6 are not compatible with each other which led to the creation of dual-stack networks. This allows devices to have both an IPv4 and an IPv6 address. For Windows 8 on dual-stack, the OS will prioritize IPv6 connections when available to help push the protocol into being the standard. Don’t worry, however, as Microsoft promises that Windows 8 will provide the best user experience in regards to the Internet regardless of the transition.

Continuing with dual-stack networks, Microsoft details their efforts in creating a new network detection algorithm that they call address sorting. It allows Windows 8 to sort through the connections available to it and choose the one that will get the job done faster than all the rest. In layman terms, it means that Windows 8 won’t spend a long time trying to connect to an IPv6 address that’s not functioning. It will be able to detect such a problem immediately and rever to IPv4.

If you’re on a device that’s IPv6 only, Windows 8 has you covered as well. When connecting to an IPv4 address through IPv6, Windows 8 will use NAT64. The only problem is that it’s extremely buggy and can cause problems with P2P connectivity. To that end, Microsoft has started to upgrade all of its services to IPv6. Starting this month, Bing will exclusively serve traffic over IPv6.

While it’s fantastic that Microsoft is being so aggressive in pushing IPv6, their insistence that all of their services use it right away might cause some issues for those on older hardware. Bing is the one to watch with it moving exclusive to IPv6 later this month. It will be interesting to see if anybody has problems accessing Bing or finds that the service is slower than usual.

On a final note, Microsoft has provided a neat widget in the blog post that tells you whether or not you have IPv4, IPv6 or dual-stack. We’re exclusive on IPv4 here so we’ll let you know if we experience any anomalies as we march towards the future of the Internet.

June 6, 2012
IPv6 Goes Live Today: The Future Of The Internet Is Here

After years of preparation and teasing, IPv6 finally goes live today. IPv4 will now begin it’s long slow death march across the wasteland of the Internet. In reality, it’s a little more complicated than that. IPv6 and IPv4 will live in harmony for many years to come, but this newest iteration is something worth celebrating.

IPv6 is the response to a problem that’s been in the making ever since the Internbet began – its exponential growth. In the beginning, there were only a few thousand IPs floating around and all was good. More and more people began to connect to the Internet in more ways than ever before. The 4.3 billion IP addresses afforded by IPv4 were no longer enough. IPv6 has been in the works since the early 90s to address the problem that we now face today.

With the launch of IPv6, a crisis has been averted. So how many addresses does IPv6 support? One would think maybe a few more billion addresses because the Internet isn’t really that big, right? Well, the Internet is a constantly evolving network with more and more addresses coming online all the time. This is why IPv6 has been granted the capacity to hold 340 undecillion addresses. I could list in arabic numerals how large that number is, but I don’t think you want to see 36 zeroes.

There’s obviously enough room for all the IPv4 addresses currently in use as well any new IP addresses that will be assigned as we march forward towards progress. Of course, you may be wondering if the introduction of IPv4 is going to force you off the Internet until you switch over to IPv6. Worry not as we’re all in this together and IPv4 will still work alongside IPv6 for years to come.

Just because IPv4 still works doesn’t mean that you should just ignore IPv6. PCWorld caught up with Tri Nguyen at ZyXEL and he explained that IPv6 offers a host of improvements over IPv4 that should have many people wanting to make the switch. The biggest reason being security. IPv6 packets are encrypted thus making it harder to actually breach a network that’s on IPv6.

Unfortunately, more secure just signals a challenge to those that launch attacks on Web sites. It was reported back in February that the number of DDoS attacks were beginning to rise on networks using IPv6. It proved that even the increased security of IPv6 could not stop all of the attacks, but security groups saw it as a perfect excuse to begin studying attacks on IPv6 addresses to develop new safeguards for the future.

Barring cyber attacks, you’re probably liking the sound of this IPv6 thing. So what does a strapping young net savvy individual have to do to prepare for the switch? Absolutely nothing. You heard that right, folks. ISPs, Web companies and equipment manufacturers are doing all the hard work for us. They will be overseeing the switch to IPv6 so that you don’t have to.

While everybody is going to have to switch over to IPv6 sooner or later, a number of companies are already switching over starting today. In our report yesterday, big players like AT&T and Google were listed among those that are fully embracing IPv6. Google has been especially proactive in regards to the switch by having Vint Cerf talk up the need for IPv6. You can see Cerf talking about IPv6 in the video below:

As you can see, IPv6 is not threatening in the least bit. In fact, it’s the best thing to happen to the Internet since, well, the Internet. The best part about it is that we don’t have to worry about it. IPv6 will be moved to new areas as needed. The only thing that people should be aware of is that any device or computer they buy should have support for IPv6. Considering that my laptop from 2004 has IPv6, the average consumer should be good.

It’s an exciting time of growth and innovation for the Internet. IPv6 is just the newest expansion that will increase the speed and security of the Internet. It’s these kind of innovations that make the Internet something to be protected from those who would rather limit it to protect their own interests, like the UN.

June 6, 2012
Google Pushes IPv6 Awareness, Adoption

In about four hours from now, the switch IPv4 to IPv6 begins on a worldwide basis. To celebrate the enabling of IPv6, the website, WorldIPv6Launch.org has a countdown clock–four hours and nine minutes as of this line–and some pertinent information about which web platforms, ISPs, and other web business will be enabling the latest Internet Protocol.

The list includes the following:

Committed ISPs:
AT&T
Comcast
Free Telecom
Internode
KDDI
Time Warner Cable
XS4ALL

Committed equipment manufacturers:

Cisco
D-Link

Web companies participating:

Facebook
Google
Bing
Yahoo!

But what is IPv6 you ask, and why is it necessary. To address this, Google has been front and center, first conducting a Google+ Hangout that featured, among others, Vint Cerf, who discussed the reasons why the new Internet Protocol is necessary. If you missed that, fear not, because Google has also created an IPv6 information page that attempts to answer any concerns web users may have. The page also includes an explanatory video, featuring Cerf himself:

The problem is that the current Internet addressing system, IPv4, only has room for about 4 billion addresses — not nearly enough for the world’s people, let alone the devices that are online today and those that will be in the future: computers, phones, TVs, watches, fridges, cars, and so on. More than 4 billion devices already share addresses. As IPv4 runs out of free addresses, everyone will need to share.

If IPv4 gives us a little over 4 billion addresses, how many will IPv6 provide? The answer is more. A lot more. Try 340 trillion trillion trillion, something Google is nice enough to put in a numeric format, just to drive the extra space IPv6 creates home:

340,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

That’s a lot of IP addresses for us to use and abuse, or, as Google puts it, “that’s a number big enough to give everyone on Earth their own list of billions of IP addresses.” With that in mind, the changeover from 4 to 6 only makes sense, especially when you consider just how many people currently access the Internet, even more so when you consider the future generations who will soon be connected.

For the SEOs out there worrying whether or not the changeover is going to ruin years and years of work, Matt Cutts has you in mind:

Follow @Stupidmonk18Steven Minardi @Stupidmonk18
@mattcutts what do you feel will be the biggest impact to the SEO market with iPv6 going live tomorrow?

Follow @mattcutts Matt Cutts
@mattcutts @Stupidmonk18 hopefully not too much impact at all.
24 minutes ago via web · powered by @socialditto
Reply · Retweet · Favorite

Any thoughts or fears you may have about the impending IPv6 changeover?

June 5, 2012

IPv6 Internet Seeing Increase In DDoS Attacks

Have you moved to the cutting edge of the Internet that is IPv6 yet? If so, did you make the move because you thought it would be safer than IPv4? Well, turns out that may not be true anymore.

In what Arbor Networks called “A Milestone in IPv6 Development,” they detail on their blog the first distributed denial of service attacks on the IPv6 Internet. According to their Worldwide Infrastructure Security Report, respondents said that they had seen DDoS attacks on their networks.

A bar graph from the report that details IPv6 security concerns lists DDoS attacks as the fourth major concern among users. It’s only behind what you would usually see as major concerns which are inadequate IPv4/IPv6 feature parity, visibility and misconfiguration.

The rise in DDoS on IPv6 can be attributed to the fact that there are now more networks using IPv6 according to Arbor. This creates more targets for those who use DDoS attacks to bring down Web sites. IPv6 is seen as a valuable asset for network operators and therefore is seen as valuable to the people who wish to attack them.

A major contributor to the rise in attacks is the number of sources to launch the attacks from. To launch an attack on an IPv6 network, the attack must be launched from the IPv6 Internet. Until now, that has been relatively hard to do as there were not a lot of injection points for the attacks to come from.

Funny enough, there apparently was a security group in Washington in the ‘90s that banked their entire existence on IPv6. They declared that the inherent security of IPv6 would lead to their jobs becoming obsolete. They disbanded under the false hopes that network security would no longer be needed.

Arbor points out that IPv6 is no more secure than IPv4. In fact, IPv6 may be more open to attack because everybody has been focused on fixing the security vulnerabilities in IPv4 since the creation of IPv6 in the mid-90s.

All of this is a good thing, however, as it highlights that IPv6 has reached the point in time where people can start developing ways to counteract DDoS attacks. You can’t very well know how to stop an attack until you live through one, so the increased number of attacks has been nothing but helpful for security groups looking to fix holes in IPv6.

The blog post suggests that networks still on IPv4 need to develop an IPv6 security game plan. This is because IPv6 vulnerabilities can exist in what they call, “apparent IPv4-only deployments.”

Internet security is constantly evolving to meet new threats. Let’s just hope that our lawmakers do their research on these emerging trends before proposing national cybersecurity bills.

Google Readies For World IPv6 Launch In June

It’s might not be an intuitive concept, but the real estate market of the Internet is running out of room. It’s been happening for some time now, so it’s not exactly a surprise but it’s something that has to be addressed, preferably sooner than later. Google, always with an eye on the future, has it covered.

In a post earlier today from their official blog, Google announced that they have joined Internet Society to coordinate a world-wide launch of the next-generation Internet protocol later this year, IPv6. The post explains the urgency of this launch:

IPv6 is the replacement for the current version of the Internet Protocol, IPv4, which is quickly running out of addresses. The original IPv6 specification was published more than 15 years ago, but for the entire career of most Internet engineers its deployment has always been in the future. Now it’s finally here. The widespread deployment of IPv6 paves the way for connecting together the billions of devices that permeate our livesーboth fixed and mobile, from the largest cloud computing services to the smallest sensors.

For Google, World IPv6 Launch means that virtually all our services, including Search, Gmail, YouTube and many more, will be available to the world over IPv6 permanently. Previously, only participants in the Google over IPv6 program (several hundred thousand users, including almost all Google employees [PDF]) have been using it every day. Now we’re including everyone.

Google’s been active in preparing World IPv6 since last year, but IPv4 has been “officially depleted” since they started working with Internet Society. Previously, websites only switched over to IPv6 for a 24-hour dry run, but now the plan is that IPv6 will be here to stay come June. By promoting World IPv6 Launch, Google hopes to persuade websites, ISPs, network device manufacturers, and other online entities to make the permanent switch to IPv6 together.

Although Google says that most users can expect a seamless transition and likely won’t notice anything different after IPv6 turns on, they do encourage people to check out their connections using Google’s test page just to be on the safe side.

Netgear Talks Ramifications of Transition to IPv6

It was recently revealed that the pool for IPv4 addresses had been depleted, meaning that the protocol for the Internet as we know it has been used up, and the transition to the next-generation IPv6 is beginning.

Drew Meyer, Senior Director of Marketing for Networking product vendor Netgear shared some thoughts on the transition with WebProNews.

"It’s a big deal for companies of all sizes because it is a fundamental change in the way the Internet works, but it is also a very subtle transition for most users," says Meyer. "Small businesses that keep older networking hardware in service longer may find they need to upgrade – but only once their networks break down. Channel partners play a key role in educating small and midsized customers."

Drew Meyer Talks IPv6 transition On what kinds of techniques businesses can embrace while they gear up for the switch to IPv6, Meyer says, "The old and the new (IPv4 and IPv6) will coexist in most networks. Modern servers and software have provisions for dual mode support, but older equipment may require replacement since it cannot support the latest software patches and firmware upgrades. We expect this to happen invisibly as network equipment is refreshed driven by other solutions, like virtualization or mobile access."

"We see it as a side benefit of modernizing midmarket networks and have plans for it across our entire product line of managed, smart and unmanaged switches," he adds.

"Developing markets like China and new applications like mobile devices and home automation demand more Internet connectivity than ever before, so first movers are positioned to become the new leaders of the next generation Internet," he says. "Winners offer simple ways for smaller companies to adopt, and losers will be those vendors who do not educate their channels and end users on the availability of the new function. Midmarket customers purchasing reliable, affordable and simple solutions will be automatically prepared for the IPv6 transition."

World IPv6 Day has been set for June 8. On that day, major web properties like Google, Facebook, and Yahoo will join content delivery networks like Akamai and Limelight Networks for a 24-hour global trial of the new protocol.

Internet As We Know It Runs Out Of Room

The pool for IPv4 addresses has been depleted. That means the protocol for the Internet as we know it has been used up, and the Internet must move toward IPv6, the next-generation protocol, which has much more room for growth.

"IPv4 has approximately four billion IP addresses (the sequence of numbers assigned to each Internet-connected device)," the Internet Society recently explained, indicating that "the explosion in the number of people, devices and web services on the Internet" is the cause of the depletion. "IPv6, the next-generation Internet protocol, which provides over four billion times more space, will connect the billions of people not connected today and will help ensure the Internet can continue its current growth rate."

"This is truly a major turning point in the on-going development of the Internet," said ICANN President and CEO Rod Beckstrom. "Nobody was caught off guard by this, the Internet technical community has been planning for IPv4 depletion for quite some time. But it means the adoption of IPv6 is now of paramount importance, since it will allow the Internet to continue its amazing growth and foster the global innovation we’ve all come to expect."

World IPv6 day had already been scheduled for June 8. This is a day in which major web properties like Google, Facebook, and Yahoo (the three of which make up a combined billion visits per day) join major content delivery networks like Akamai and Limelight Networks for a 24-hour global trial of IPv6, the next-generation Internet protocol. More on this here. Update: Bing has now announced participation in IPv6 day.

The American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN) is publishing a daily report of its own IPv4 inventory of available addresses on its home page. It also has a helpful FAQ page set up. The Number Resource Organization (NRO) has further explanation of the news.