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IPv6 Tested in Space
Posted by
CmdrTaco
on Sun Apr 08, 2007 09:59 AM
from the still-nobody-using-it-down-here dept.
from the still-nobody-using-it-down-here dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Remember the Cisco router orbiting on a satellite in space? Well, it's now also the first to run IPv6 in space. Since no-one is choosing to run IPv6 on the ground, isn't this a bit pointless?"
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Router Tested On Satellite In Space 21 comments
The Cisco router launched into orbit in September onboard a satellite built by SSTL (and on a Russian rocket) has now been successfully tested in space, and there's a video describing this and putting routers in space. A neat twenty-year coincidence here: an early Surrey satellite has been operating for twenty years, and Cisco launched its fastest router on its twentieth birthday. What do the next twenty years hold for fast routers in space?
[+]
Technology: Interplanetary Internet Tested In Space 124 comments
Anonymous Coward writes "After Vint Cerf planned the Interplanetary Internet, there's a press release saying that the Interplanetary Internet is now being tested in space, using the Bundle Protocol developed by the Delay-Tolerant Networking Research Group. There's a conference paper with details on the testing too. These guys were previously the first to test IPv6 in space. Now they've found something with even fewer users than IPv6 to play with!"
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Pointless? No. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Pointless? No. (Score:5, Funny)
Even with a stepladder.
Parent
Re:Pointless? No. (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Pointless? No. (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Just in case it catastrophically fails.... (Score:5, Funny)
I mean after all it might even potentially set the Earths atmosphere on fire, if it were testing on the ground!
IP in Space (Score:5, Informative)
Thank you,
your NASA team
Cosmic Rays (Score:2)
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This surely is bullshit! (Score:4, Funny)
Cisco's New Marketing Campaign (Score:5, Funny)
Cisco - We circle the globe with IPv6 support.
Cisco - THE standard for aerospace IPv6 deplyment archetecture.
Cisco - Our IPv6 technology is rated "higher" than any of our competitors.
*in space
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Gee, why is no one switching to IPv6? (Score:4, Interesting)
Why is no one running IPv6 on the ground? Well, I'll tell you why I don't run it:
Besides, who wants to deal with IPv6 when dotted quads are easier to memorize? Just wrench the class A address assignments away from the current assignees (not a single one of them needs a class A block) and reallocate them reasonably. Apple does not need a class A block, Merck doesn't, HP doesn't, GE doesn't, IBM doesn't, MIT doesn't. Halliburton doesn't, and the DoD certainly does not need multiple
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Re:Gee, why is no one switching to IPv6? (Score:5, Insightful)
The real PITA then, is trying to get people to do something about this problem before it really becomes a problem. People keep commenting on the slow transition to IPv6 as if it's a failure of the protocol. No, as you implied, it's a failure of the software developers who aren't implementing it, the hardware manufacturers who aren't supporting it, and the ISPs who aren't providing it. Instead of trying to free up more IPv4 address space we should be letting it become a scarce resource to force the guilty parties to make the necessary updates so that nobody's caught short on that fateful day when we well and truly are out of IPv4 addresses. We should be taking every step possible to limit the amount of software and hardware from being deployed that we already know will be useless a couple of decades from now, instead it seems like so many people are quite happy to take their sweet time with it until alarm bells start ringing.
You'd think with things like the Y2k bug and numerous other situations which exposed the fallacies of the "it'll do for now, we'll deal with that later" ideology that the computing industry would be all too happy to see that the IP address situation was spotted well ahead of time and would be embracing the ability to future-proof their software and IT infrastructures. Instead it seems like we're going to have another case of fingers-in-their-ears-"la-la we're not listening - oh shit! we're out of IP addresses!" situation with a mad dash to half-assed implementations and slap-dash patches.
Parent
Re:Gee, why is no one switching to IPv6? (Score:5, Insightful)
If I may make a car analogy...
Let us say that IPv4 is the oil we get from the ground and all cars run off it. Then a small group of scientists do a study and say discover "Egads! We've only got 10 years worth of oil left!"
Everyone panics and the scientists come up with a pure ethanol based car (IPv6) that has none of the limitations of oil when it comes to making new ones (In theory we could eventually use up all our natural resources in production of corn, but that would take thousands of years so that is someone eles's problem)
However, such a switch over would cost millions if not billions of dollars spent replacing all the oil based motors, but they start the work.
Then.... Some smart ingenious mechanic finds a way to make regular engines work off 50% ethanol and 50% oil (NAT addressing) and everyone goes "Phew! Problem solved!"
However, that doesn't resolve the fact that oil is still going to run out in 20 years but by then that will be someone else's problem.
But in reality, I think the US, Canada, and Europe will switch to IPv6 when their counter parts in China and India surpass us economically in 10 to 20 years. (As in Chinese companies start buying US companies and then tell their network departments to migrate so they can communicate better)
Asia is the big pusher for IPv6 because they simply did not get any of the IPv4 to start with and NAT isn't helping them much considering they will have literally the majority of world's internet users. Unless, like you say, the big US tech companies give up the IPv4 spaces to companies in Asia I think they are on the path to complete IPv6 networks over there.
Either way... I think most of us will get IPv6 equipment when it was cheaper for the manufacture to not disable the feature in our standard IPv4 products (think built in modem or video into the mother board trend) but this might be some time from now.
Parent
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The main problem with your theory is that China and India are unlikely to surpass us economically in 20 years. To illustrate my point, let's compare the US and China. According to wikipedia [wikipedia.org] the US GDP is approx $12.5 Trillion. The Chinese GDP is about $2.2 Trillion. If the US economy had zero growth for 20 years, and the Chinese economy wou
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Re:Gee, why is no one switching to IPv6? (Score:5, Insightful)
You dont need their support. Use 6to4. Or a tunnel.
"NONE of my routers support it"
You dont need them to. Use 6to4.
"A lot of applications I run don't support it."
Some do tho. It's wonderful to be able to ssh and scp directly into the boxes you have behind a NAT gateway without having to resort to two-stage jumps.
"Dealing with it on apache would be a PITA, wouldn't it?"
No.
"who wants to deal with IPv6 when dotted quads are easier to memorize?"
There's this new development called DNS you know...
"Just wrench the class A"
Mmm, like that's going to happen...
Meanwhile I sit here on a bazillion addresses, merit of having one single v4 address. Get with the times, it's not like IPv6 is rocket science anymore.
Parent
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Tunnels I can sympathise. No quality. Abysmal uptime, and nobody to complain to if it goes wrong.. not to mention that 90% of the people who were providing them have packed up and gone home when the 6bone went titsup. I eventually gave up on my hosting machines' ipv6 after I did the uptime graphs.. uptime was about 30%, and the latency never got less than 500
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And I forgot to add... Who memorizes IP addresses anymore?
I used to back in the day, but DHCP isn't as flaky anymore so no need for static IP on the OS side and if your router setup is worth a snuff you can assign a static IP via DHCP based of your NIC's MAC address so it gets the same IP address each time. And since most people are blocking use of their DNS servers unless you are on their network also makes it pointless to know I
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He never said that knowledge of IP addresses is totally unnecessary, he said that memorization of IP addresses is unnecessary.
New and different technology means new and different ways of management. Just because it means you have to re-think how you manage and impliment things doesn't mean that it's a bad thing or bad idea..
Once again: "Somehow, you are suggesting that knowledge of IP addresses is totally unnecessary on the administration a
Re:Gee, why is no one switching to IPv6? (Score:5, Interesting)
Plus, some stupid applications insist on trying IPv6 if it is installed and wait forever for the packets to time out... A common problem I ran into with folks who tinkered under XP was massive slowdowns with Firefox after someone had installed IPv6. Remove IPv6 and everything was fine. Of course...Vista doesn't like it when you try to remove IPv6... Haven't had any calls about slowdowns yet...maybe Vista handles the stack better than XP did...
As far as "no-one is choosing to run IPv6 on the ground"... Well, that's just not true. Many ISPs are running IPv6 on their internal networks. You'll never see it because your modem/router/LAN live in an IPv4 tunnel...but it's there. I know I've seen Job Ads for the local hospital asking for IPv6 experience as well...though I don't know if they're actually using it yet or just preparing for the future.
"Dotted quads" may be easier for you to memorize...but I suspect this is largely because that's what you're dealing with on a day-to-day basis. Remember when you were little and it was hard to memorize addresses or phone numbers? Now that seems incredibly simple, doesn't it? Remember when you were just learning IP and wondered why you couldn't use DNS for absolutely everything (because names are so much easier to memorize than numbers). Plus, IPv6 supports a couple different ways to abbreviate [wikipedia.org] addresses...such as stripping leading 0's or replacing them with
And simply re-allocating the IPv4 address space just isn't going to cut it. There aren't enough addresses out there. The only reason we've been able to stay with IPv4 for so long is NAT, which causes problems [wikipedia.org] of its own. The bottom line is that we need more addresses than IPv4 has.
Parent
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Comcast is nowhere near implementing this, either.
The US ISPs either run IPv6 as an edge service (in a VRF, say) or using tunneling approaches, or on limited deploy
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That doesn't mean they're running it. My MacBook right now says this:
Sprint & Verio (Score:3, Interesting)
As for Sprint, they often brag about their L2TPv3 core, with MPLS, and other private-IP services off
It's a security feature (Score:2)
Obviously (Score:2)
- Necron69
ps. Take my bitch ex-wife while you are at it.
Ignorance is NOT bliss (Score:5, Informative)
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If you go to one of the good latency calculators [sixxs.net], you'll see that the delta between IPv6 performance and IPv4 performance is substantial, with IPv6 performance showing as a heck of a lot worse (about twice as poor).
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Please correct me if I failed to
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No government agency does either.
Evidence? Try to get OSPFv3 working without an IPv4 router-ID. Try to get encryption (IPv6SEC) working without using IPSEC (over IPv4 transport). Try getting VoIPv6 working, or looking for hardware support for multiple queues for IPv6 packets.
Networx was just awarded a couple of days ago, and specifies those services which are to be orderable over t
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Router IDs, at least in OSPF (all versions) and BGP, are not IPv4 addresses. They are a 32 bit number, that in some implementations are displayed as dotted quad. It is only common practice to make your publicly available router ID to match one of your assigned IPv4 addresses, so that collisions between Router IDs will rarely happen.
I still run across companies that have router IDs of 1, 2, 3 etc. Some router implementations will randomly grab the lowest IP
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New meme (Score:5, Funny)
Examples:
I wonder if that Cisco has been patched... (Score:4, Interesting)
NOTE: Some of the listed problems indicate a "Cisco 3200 Catalyst", which may not be the same as the orbiting "Cisco 3200 Mobile Access Router". IANACG (I am not a Cisco geek).
If only I could hack the ISS (Score:3, Funny)
It'd have a fun effect, to be sure.
You want IPv6 adoption? Make it reasonable. (Score:4, Interesting)
Make getting address space cheap and easy!!! IPv6 is huge, why do I have pay ridiculous recurring fees to get a block? Make small allocations free, registration free and online, then just make me return a confirmation letter/call/email once every 5 years to renew. IPv6 space is monstrous, it is terrible that you have to pay outrageous fees to become a member organization and then huge recurring fees for addresses. Why do ISP's have to go through the same backflips and outrageous pricing schemes that served to reduce demand for IPv4 addresses.
Once you have major content providers onboard and make it free and easy to get address space, then ISP can advertise access to the 'NEW AND IMPROVED' internet.
Imagine a beowulf cluster of these... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Not true (Score:4, Interesting)
Such as?
First, what does a networking potocol have to do with a business model; And second, how can any company survive with a business model dependant on something not supported by most ISPs?
Serious questions, not sarcasm.
Parent
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Go look up Communication clients and services, from simple IM and Voice to remote clients and client tracking.
And second, how can any company survive with a business model dependant on something not supported by most ISPs?
Go look up, "tunneling."
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First, what does a networking protocol have to do with a business model
And second, how can any company survive with a busine
um, no. (Score:3, Informative)
And Apple's business model is absolutely not dependent on Bonjour: I think perhaps you are misunderstanding the term "business model." An example of a business model is:
"We give away high-quality software for free to get people to buy our hardware, where we make high margins" - that's an example of Apple's business model.
"By becoming
Re:Not true (Score:4, Interesting)
The U.S. federal government has mandated it, so anyone wishing to get into that business needs it.
That being said, my university has been running IPv6 for a few years now -- we luckily have native IPv6 feed from I2 -- and all of our routers (Cisco IOS), servers (various variants of Linux) and clients (MacOS X, Linux, Windows XP) have supported it just fine.
Parent
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The IPv6 designers have hampered adoption by insisting on solving problems which are not directly related to address size (like autoconfiguration, QoS, etc) and rolling those into the protocol - because so many of these useful features which were steadily glommed onto IPv4 have not ye
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IPv6 was designed by a lot of smart people who work on end-systems, with not a whole lot of folks who actually run very large networks being involved - that's why multihoming still remains a problem (yes, yes, I know, get some PI-space, or is Shim-6 still the suggested approach? Oh wait, that