IPv6 Woes

[gossamersolid 155]

I've heard that ISPs will be moving to IPv6 here within two years or so. I have a really good question about IPv6. How will having an IPv6 address effect current and older games.

Here's a fine example, when I press "remote" in the arma 2 server browser, I type in my server's IP which is in 4 octets xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx. What if the server is now an IPv6 address, does the game still understand the new IP address and how to find it? Say my server's IPv6 address is now FE80:0000:0000:0000:0202:B3FF:FE1E:8329. Do I get to type that into the remote connect or will BIS have to update ArmA 2 first to allow for IPv6 support?

Also how the hell is anybody supposed to memorize IPv6 addresses. I find it rather easy to remember IPv4, but these IPv6 ones look crazy.

[NeMeSiS 11]

Also how the hell is anybody supposed to memorize IPv6 addresses. I find it rather easy to remember IPv4, but these IPv6 ones look crazy.

You could write them down. :p

[Colossus 2]

I've been wondering this myself and I hope someone might answer this question. As far as I understand, they will run out of IPv4 sometime next year if it's spent in the same rate as now. Of course, servers already on IPv4 will still be there, but at some time there isn't any IPs left to spare and you can't make any more game servers in IPv4. I am however not sure if the depletion of IPs will become an instant effect or if it will take some time before you see the effects.

Either way, around November it was only 100 days left until they ran out. IPv4 Countdown (Twitter)

[doomie 10]

Most modern DNS servers and clients (i.e. your workstation) understand and support IPv6 syntax, so DNS *should* just work as is; forums.bistudio.com should work fine :)

IPv4 address depletion has been discussed to death for years now. It's going to happen at some point, but personally I don't believe all the doom and gloom saying within the next year. There are still a few large blocks to be allocated by IANA to the regional registries (RIPE, ARIN, APNIC) , and even then those registries will take some time to burn through them.

If the source, destination and transit networks support IPv6, then it should be plain sailing. A few large ISPs (ipv6.he.net to name one) out there already run IPv6 backbones, with some allowing you to tunnel your current IPv4 addressing through to IPv6 hosts and vice versa. Some US Federal Departments have been mandated to switch to IPv6.

It's not going to happen overnight, but with all the recent exposure in the news to the upcoming allocation shortage, i'm sure that will help move things along.

Unfortunately, like everything these days, the major road blocks in this are due to political and financial motivations.

[whisper 0]

IP depletion may occur next year at IANA level.

Which doesn't mean IP will be depleted for everyone.

The whole address range will have been allocated to all regional entities responsible for address allocation to companies (ARIN in N America, RIPE in Europe, AFNIC in Africa and so on ... )

All these regional entities do NOT have allocated their reserved address space, and local depletion will NOT occur next year.

Stating "The Doom" is for next year is wrong and not understanding how address allocation works. Each local entities have "plenty" of room available (in fact, I don't know the numbers, but there is room left in each of these entities)

That said, it doesn't mean nothing should be done.

Alternative solutions/ways of waiting IPv6 are horrible and have very bad impact on internet traffic, they involve massive address translation, which, while being a common thing in current CPE (the equipment your ISP is giving you to connect to Internet), has severe limitations and often require some specific configuration at the point of translation (typically, "opening the ports for your game on your router" is due to address translation issues), which won't be possible, at least easily, if massive translation techniques are used.

So IPv6 transition is a necessity.

And it's not that hard a concept to grasp, the transition is easy.

I was also not really confortable with the v6 address format, but we are @work in the process of migrating our core network to v6 (and that's one of my assignments :) ), which made me work on it, and after like 1h of manipulating addresses, you get along fine.

Knowing that, of course, the majority of what users see on the Internet are domain names, never the IPs behind. No big deal for the user.

Issue is content at the moment.

There is no content on the "IPv6 world" side of the Internet to be of any value for customers, meaning no one will migrate fully to v6. The transition must be smooth, and it means that content (Google, Facebook, file sharing companies, etc...) must transition. Google is rather active at least, the rest, well....

Imho at some point things are going to get ugly (some kind of "partitioned" Internet that will require bad translation techniques, though the latest NAT64/DNS64 proposals are sexy to permit communication between v4 and v6)

Biggest point is having IPv6 compatible applications. Your web browser, mail apps, games, etc...

I don't think A2 is v6 compatible for instance. Though, who knows? :)

It's testable, the server in my sig actually has a reachable IPv6 (done through Hurricane Electric, the current major IPv6 tunnel broker and IPv6 actor, you can get an IPv6 on your PC easily through their free offer, look here : http://tunnelbroker.net/index.php) : 2001:470:1f12:327::2 (and as you see, the IP is not that long ;) )