Six Reasons It's Blame IPv6 Day

Posted by Mike Fratto
June 08, 2011

As far as I am concerned, it's not World IPv6 Day. It's Blame IPv6 Day. This is a good opportunity to take any new technology (OK, IPv6 is not new, but it might as well be) and use it as the whipping boy it deserves to be. It's IPv6's turn. So, lets get started!

1. Data bloat: Yes, you can blame IPv6 for data bloat. Do you think your cute little IPv4 spreadsheets and data bases are big now? Wait until you have to expand those fields from 32 bits to 128 bits. Try to remember that! Oh, and they are in hex, so while you only have to remember 16 digits (0-9A-F), they go together in wacky combinations. Blech.

2. Website failures: Yes, you can blame all of your host unreachables on IPv6 too. Most computers when configured with IPv6 and IPv4, which is a default nowadays, will try to resolve IPv6 DNS records first, the so-called Quad A records. (IPv6 DNS names are AAAA records. Why, since it is IPv6, aren't DNS records called AAAAAA records, because then they would be called Sex A [the Latin word for six is sex]). If the computer gets a quad A, it will try to use it and likely fail. Hence, all website failures are due to IPv6.
3. Email bloat to beleaguered journalists. Anyone who has ever written anything about IPv6 is getting hammered by well-meaning, but persistent, PR people to cover their vendors' stance on IPv6. Clearly, IPv6 is top of mind, but since those crazy kids at the Internet Society deemed June 8 IPv6 Day, the June 5 deadline (again, why not June 6th? As in 6/6 or April 6 as in 4/6?) to get pitches out has caused this. While the blame squarely rests with ISOC, it's really IPv6 that caused it.
4. You're more insecure. IPv6 is a new protocol, so, along with the inherent issues with new protocols, the reality is that scanning an IPv6 subnet will take forever. A paltry IPv6 /62 has 4.16 x10^18 addresses. Danny McPherson, CSO of Verisign corporate, suggests that'll take a long time to scan and offers a big haystack for attackers to hide in. Stupid IPv6 and its ridiculously large address space.

5. Can't hear me now? You have to upgrade your phone. If we take Verizon Wireless as an example as a leading U.S. wireless carrier, chances are you will have to upgrade from 3G to LTE to get IPv6 on your smartphone. Jean McManus, executive director of Verizon Corporate Technology Organization, indicates that Verizon Wireless is unlikely to migrate its 3G networks to IPv6 since most smartphone users will likely move to LTE anyway through evolution.
6. IPv6 news fatigue. You saw this one coming. The networking industry is looking for the Next Big Thing ™ and IPv6 is in strong contention with Fiber Channel over Ethernet, flatter networks and Openflow. IPv6 World Day is just the start.

Mike Fratto is editor of Network Computing. You can email him, follow him on Twitter, or join the Network Computing group on LinkedIN. He's not as grumpy as he seems.

Related Reading

More Insights