Srdjan Todorovic wrote:
Hi,
On 03/02/2010, Mark Rogers mark@quarella.co.uk wrote:
But having followed the various conversations about IPv6 capable ISPs, I'm left wondering why anyone wants to actually use IPv6 right now?
Native IP level security? More addresses.
Can't remember any other advantage.
Well "more addresses" is so many more we can ditch NAT which was a horrible hack in the first place.
Even ignoring that I believe the routing overhead of ipv6 is actually lighter.
What about the things like multicast built into the spec ? I dunno if this will get implemented everywhere but if it did then it could change how we deal with media on our networks.
Flow Labels could also simplify things like QoS
Can you imagine a LAN Party with IPv6? :o I know people suggest running a DNS server to helpfully translate IP addresses to names, but is it really feasible for everyone to run their own DNS server? .... even on a LAN party? (or similar ad-hoc LAN gathering)
Well I am sure for ad-hoc networks you are already going to be using DHCP to reduce setup times and it's trivial then to add a DNS server into the mix, in fact I believe many consumer routers can do this by default.
The only real issue here is once we ditch NAT's (which hopefully will become redundant) you no longer have the same common private address subnets in use everywhere. 192.168.0.whatever isn't in itself particularly memorable except that we are used to seeing it so frequently.
I am not sure how we are going to cope with default configurations on Network kit like routers where you need to talk to it once to set the correct address. Will we rely completely on DHCP auto configuration and hope that the new device isn't the thing that is supposed to be providing that. Or is new equipment going to be factory configured somewhere in the fc00::/7 space ?