PapaMidnight
join:2009-01-13
Baltimore, MD
| reply to Hangmn
Re: It'll be a slow process
said by Hangmn  :Thats just it YOU CAN run servers because of PAT, NAT's brother....see? I run servers..just fine behind my IP. The average household, which may now see up to 4 or more computers in a house running multiple torrents, games, voip, etc. could easily bring any consumer level router to its knees with PAT.
Likewise, any large scale corporation with 100-1000 computers minimal, would run out of ports VERY VERY quickly.
NAT has its advantages for local based networking. Ports which need to go out can be routed just fine; additional IPs do help when you have more than one device that needs to respond to public port 80 request.
NAT, however, is a handicap solution. It was meant to stifle growth of IPv4 usage (which it admittedly did) and it gave end users an opportunity easily implement their own home networks.
Certainly helped many corporations and universities as well who certainly saw no problem consuming their 10.0.0.0 blocks, which is probably half the problem: They saw NAT as a solution and didn't cough up their unused IPs. Therefore, you've got thousands of IPs in use by single entities perpetually going to waste.
IPv6 offers an extremely wide array advantages over IPv4 and NAT or PAT, especially considering the fact it would certainly lighten the load on any consumer level router and the simple fact that it would not suffer the same limitation of PAT and NAT in that no port forwarding would be required.
Now not to say IPv4 should be entirely eliminated. Definitely not. I can't begin to imagine what would happen if someone suggested even the thought of such. IPv4 will still be necessary as 90% (more likely 99%) of consumer devices don't even support IPv6. Hell, even pfSense doesn't offer native support for it nor does DD-WRT on most devices it supports. Tomato is practically a niche market compared to DD-WRT. OpenWRT and such are even less of a market. The simple fact is that an IPv6 switchover needs to be coordinated and handled, certainly a lot better than the DTV switch over at that.
For example: As was with the DTV switch over, devices not supporting IPv6 out the box need to be clearly labeled. Consumers need to be made aware of what IPv6 is and its contrast to IPv4. 90% of the people on this mass of land called the USA won't even know what IPv4 is, where there in your problem will lie. Those same 90% and then some will have older routers that will not support IPv6, where in one of two things will need to happen: A mandate for all current market level devices to be updated with IPv6 support (yeah, government interfering in private company matters, blah blah blah), and a mandate that all future devices support IPv6.
Another reason IPv4 will need to remain available to all is the simple fact that many consumers can't use IPv6 since their applications don't support it. I've seen thousands of people playing older games or using older software that have no chance of ever seeing an update to support IPv6. That is unfortunately just the way the market works.
It is for the reasons outlined above in regards to both hardware and software that people simply will need to have both IPv6 and IPv4 available to them. |
