IPv6?

cmb

Maybe I'm not the best person to go saying this here but I just can't help myself from doing it…
Has IPv6 been accepted by the whole industry market players, or at least a big majority?
Is it a finished product?
And I'm not talking about it's concept that has beens ready for many years already.
I don't mean to underestimate Cisco or anything but they're the only ones clearly supporting IPv6.
No other big market player has been so actively interested in implementing IPv6 in their products as they have.

That's not true, virtually every major commercial networking vendor has full IPv6 support. The standards have been final for quite some time. Every major OS includes support, as do all the big name network devices. The US government has mandated IPv6 support on everything it purchases pending a forced change by 2008 or 2009 (I don't recall for sure, somewhere around there), and those sales alone were enough to push all the major vendors to include support.

How widely and quickly we'll see businesses and ISP's switch over is another question entirely. Given that the IPv4 address space shortage isn't as bad as it's sometimes made out to be, it'll probably be a while. At least in the US for sure. Asia will likely be the first to see major deployment, since address shortages are much more of an issue there. In the US, most ISP's have enough IP's that they won't have to worry about IPv6 for a very long time. For example, my cable ISP has several million IP's registered in my city, with only a population of 700,000. They have something like 5-10 IP's per person, which is more than I would ever envision them using given there are at least a couple dozen other ISP's here.

Granted, IP address shortages isn't the only reason to use IPv6, but it is the factor that will probably eventually drive ISP's, and hence businesses and homes, to IPv6. I expect ISP's, especially residential ones, to hold out as long as possible due to the difficulty of getting users to do something to their machines/routers as relatively difficult as a switch from IPv4 to IPv6. (most of these people are lucky to be able to figure out how to turn on a PC)

cmb

@Alien:

I'm not very experienced, but I think implenting IPv6 shouldn't be too difficult, if you use the aviable documentation, software and other resources.

at this point, we're a lot more concerned about making sure everything with IPv4 works fine. We've discussed IPv6 on our private dev list, and there is a lot of work in the GUI required that just isn't justifiable at this point, given that 99.99999% of the Internet is IPv4-only.

rds_correia

I'm sorry but I still can't see much use for IPv6 right now…
Can you enlighten me on what we could gain from it nowadays?
Cheers

cmb

@rds_correia:

I'm sorry but I still can't see much use for IPv6 right now…
Can you enlighten me on what we could gain from it nowadays?

read the wikipedia article linked above, explains it well.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv6

the just of it is:
more addresses
encryption as a requirement, rather than an add-on (IPsec on everything)
elimination of NAT, which is an ugly "solution" to the problem of IP address shortage, or a solution to avoiding the cost of public IP's

rds_correia

Hi cmb,
I'm plenty aware of what IPv6 is ;).
My point here is, how can it be usefull nowadays that there's almost nothing using IPv6.
We're all still using IPv4, so if it were to be implemented in pfSense what would we gain from it?
Cheers

Alien

@rds_correia:

We're all still using IPv4, so if it were to be implemented in pfSense what would we gain from it?

Experience and Users.
Experience: IPv6 will come (nobody knows when this will be). But what's more important is, that things like IPsec become backported.
There will be no switchday. Nobody will say: Now IPv4 is death and IPv6 is here. It will take much time to change. I'm not sure, if IPv4 will die anytime. IPv6 will coexist many, many years and the change already begun.

Users: Many IPv6-Users prefer BSD (as I said: It is the most advanced IPv6-platform). There are many people, that would be happy to see, that pfSense supports IPv6. More and more people get interedted in this protocol. And that's a fact (see usergroup, google for IPv6-infosites, see userstatistics of sixxs or other IPv6-projects, …). The community isn't small..

sullrich

Well the IPV6 reference platform is Kame which is heavily sync'd to the bsd's.

In fact the IPV6 project was recently announced that their goals have been met!

This is a good thing, IPv6 seems to be great, and as I have never used it, I welcome the overlord.

:)

Scott

rds_correia

Hmm, ok seeing it from the "experience" side of things I'd say it would be nice to have IPv6 on pfS.
Anyway I still don't see it as a major feature needed ASAP.
Cheers

rical

If you want to integrate IPv6 you will have to change pfsense to a more flexible product right now wich means deep and major changes… Let's plan for a 2.0 or 3.0 release :-). Also remember the first goals of the project and the actual complexity of Ipv6 use. For "powerUsers" I suggest FreeBSD or OpenBSD as IPv6 gateways.
For the soekris and others note that IPv6 (crypto and stuff) may be too "ressource consumming"...

Alien

I'm not saying it has to be done yet.
I see that it is (at this time) much more to work at IPv4.
But with BSD as platform I think it would be a cool feature.

I just want you to make you think about IPv6…

Alien

Sorry for doubleposting.
Is kame supported in pfSense?
Then I don't think, that it would be very difficult to do this: http://www.sixxs.net/faq/connectivity/?faq=usingsubnet&os=kame.router

I'm sorry… I have not very much experience with routers/networks. But I don't think, that it would be too difficult to create a package with a small package with a gui for this.

Sorry, if this is nonsense!

EDIT:
@ "Why do we need IPv6 (yet)?"
I think it's more a question of supporting it.
If there are more services/more software then it's IPv6-time.
IPv6 brings answers on problems like NATs/Ipv6 and VoIP.

sullrich

Kame is supported but I think you discount how hard that modifying all of the screens and backend truly are.

billm

@sullrich:

Kame is supported but I think you discount how hard that modifying all of the screens and backend truly are.

No kidding shudder

–Bill