Quinn Ebert

Unit 2 Discussion

IPv6′s “MVP” feature – IPsec from the ground-up:

Those of us who’ve recently completed the CIS212 (Network Security Concepts) course probably remember at least a thing or two about IPsec. For those of us who were really paying attention, you might notice that the labs we completed in that course all dealt with IPsec on IPv4. So, why is this worth mentioning as one of the most important features of IPv6, then? Well, what we should be learning right about now is that, originally, IPsec was not a part of the IPv4 standard. The arrival of IPv6 brought with it IPsec, and IPsec has slowly been “back-ported” (or adapted to work) with IPv4. Even with this being the case, IPsec is built into IPv6 from the ground-up, making IPv6 a much more security-conscious protocol by-default.

Why is IPv6 being so slowly adopted?

My beliefs about the rather slow adoption of IPv6 center mainly around the fact that, from many perspectives, IPv6 is a massive change in thinking about how internetworked systems will operate. IPv4 and IPv6 are mostly-incompatible (i.e. they do not “talk” with one another). While some operating systems (Mac OS X and Windows Vista/7 come to mind) have the ability to run both versions of the IP protocol at the same time and on the same NIC, the fact that the IPv6 protocol isn’t yet (necessarily) supported by every single Internet-connected computer serves to slow the transition for worries of incompatibility. In order for IPv6 to start to really “take hold” in my opinion, there will need to be a fundamental shift in statistics regarding peoples’ retirement of the use of old (e.g. Mac OS Classic/Windows 95/Windows 98/Windows NT/Windows ME) Operating Systems on networked computers to help ease the flow to a wholly IPv6-based Internet.

What could happen to accelerate the change to IPv6?

I believe the most obvious reason to rapidly accelerate transitions to IPv6 centers around the long-feared IPv4 address space exhaustion scenario. At the same time, I feel it prudent to point out that it will take some collaborative “figuring out” on the part of numerous Network Administrators from around the world to figure out just when the IPv4 address space has been truly “used up.” Furthermore, many hosting service providers (especially Virtual Private/Dedicated Server hosts and Dedicated/Managed Server Hosts) still seem quite able to provision new IPv4 addresses to customers, seeming to indicate that the problem of address exhaustion has been somewhat stemmed. At the same time, of course, ARIN’s much-heightened IP provisioning requirements have likely helped quite a lot to aid in the prevention of this scenario becoming a reality thus-far.