[JorgeA]

Hello,

I just read this article in PC World.

What implications (if any) does the impending move to IPv6 have for those of us who are using Windows 98 and hardware from that era? The following paragraph from this article sounds especially ominous:

"If you keep a piece of IPv4-only equipment, someday it won't be able to talk to the rest of the network because two different addressing schemes are at play--kind of like trying to use a telephone number to send a piece of paper mail."

Here are some questions to ponder:

• Is this true, or just so much hype?
  
• Will the browsers on our Win98 boxes one day give us a "the page cannot be displayed" error that cannot be fixed?
  
• What (if anything) can we do to our machines to make them ready for IPv6?
  
• Finally, what might this mean for home networks -- will Win98 boxes networked behind a router still be able to talk to each other within the network, even if they can no longer access the Internet? (I think so, but am asking to make sure.)

Tell me that I'm worrying too much.

--JorgeA

[dencorso]

JorgeA, on 17 August 2010 - 11:27 AM, said:

Tell me that I'm worrying too much.

You're worrying too much!!!
The simplest solution is to use a router to translate IPv6 to IPv4. It just works!
BTW, search before you post... Can Windows 9x support IPv6

[artemus]

Quote

The simplest solution is to use a router to translate IPv6 to IPv4. It just works!

Unless you happen to live in an area where broadband isn't available, and your only choice is dial-up.

"Survey: 40 percent in U.S. have no broadband"
http://news.cnet.com...0454133-94.html

Quote: "...many of those in rural areas reported that broadband is simply not available."

[Queue]

If you're on dial-up the dial-up ISP could probably do the IPv6/IPv4 translation. Alternatively, a gateway that does the actual dial-up connection and understands IPv6 could do the translation for IPv4 machines connected to it.

Queue

This post has been edited by Queue: 17 August 2010 - 03:49 PM

[JorgeA]

dencorso,

Whew, what a relief!

Will a current (from the last 2-3 years) router work, or would I go out and get a new one? (Not that that's an obstacle, just that it'll be useful to know for when the time comes). Maybe a better way to frame the question is to ask how one can determine if the current router can handle IPv6.

Umm, I did search and find that same thread. But it was several months old, and (more importantly) it didn't seem to end on a very hopeful-sounding note, so I wanted to see if things had changed since then.

--JorgeA

This post has been edited by JorgeA: 17 August 2010 - 04:10 PM

[wsxedcrfv]

I would think that the vast majority of people that are home or SOHO internet users will have (or be given) new DSL or cable modems by their ISP's that are IPv6 aware (on the WAN side) and perform NAT translation to IPv4 IP address's on their LAN side. So any equipment on the LAN side theoretically wouldn't need to know anything about IPv6 - unless ...

Unless a machine tries to perform a DNS lookup on a domain or website and an IPv6 address is returned as the result (does this happen now?).

Are there any DNS queries right now that will return an IPv6 result?

What happens when a client with an IPv6 IP address tries to access a web-site where the server is not IPv6-aware? Does the client get an error (404 - website not available) ? How would the server log the transaction (what IP address would the server end up recording) ?

[bristols]

dencorso, on 17 August 2010 - 12:27 PM, said:

JorgeA, on 17 August 2010 - 11:27 AM, said:

Tell me that I'm worrying too much.

You're worrying too much!!!
The simplest solution is to use a router to translate IPv6 to IPv4. It just works!

While that would a solution, I guess it's likely to be the only one. It would be a pity, I think, that to all intents and purposes our 9x systems would be tethered to one location (our routers with IPv6 to v4 translation). No more public Wi-Fi, for instance. More hardware to buy and contend with.

Am I underestimating here how widespread IPv6 to v4 translation will be in routers? Does anyone know whether or not that translation automatically occurs to clients that do not present themselves as IPv6-capable?

This post has been edited by bristols: 17 August 2010 - 05:01 PM

[wsxedcrfv]

bristols, on 17 August 2010 - 04:58 PM, said:

It would be a pity, I think, that to all intents and purposes our 9x systems would be tethered to one location (our routers with IPv6 to v4 translation). No more public Wi-Fi, for instance.

I don't know about you, but I've never seen a portable PC (laptop, netbook, etc) that had win-98 drivers for it's built-in wifi radio. The closest I ever came to such a laptop was a Dell Inspiron 600m that I bought in late 2005 (or was it late 2004?) that I was able to get fully working running win-98se (video, audio, etc) except for the Intel WiFi radio (this was the "Centrino" chipset).

So for me, the idea of a portable win-98 system (with wifi connectivity) was never a reality to begin with.

This post has been edited by wsxedcrfv: 17 August 2010 - 05:14 PM

[cyberformer]

Hello JorgeA, and everyone else addressing this issue: the likes of which I am still,
Very, Very, Very, worried about!

No matter what anyone has said so far in seeking to alleviate the stress of us worry-worts concerning our increasing stress,
I will not be at all my usual happy relaxed self, until one of the greatly knowledgeable,
folk (to whom we 9x users should be forever great-fully indebted to) comes up with an "Actual patch"
that once implemented---gives us the only and true antidote to our prevailing worry-wort condition.

I still believe, dare I make prophesy---that this Sword of Damocles has yet to be stayed;
that it looms as the greatest challenge the 9x user will face, in our vehement resolve to use the OS we Will to use!

[bristols]

wsxedcrfv, on 17 August 2010 - 05:13 PM, said:

bristols, on 17 August 2010 - 04:58 PM, said:

It would be a pity, I think, that to all intents and purposes our 9x systems would be tethered to one location (our routers with IPv6 to v4 translation). No more public Wi-Fi, for instance.

I don't know about you, but I've never seen a portable PC (laptop, netbook, etc) that had win-98 drivers for it's built-in wifi radio.

Wouldn't know. I use a Cardbus Wi-Fi card. It has a 98 SE driver.

[JorgeA]

cyberformer,

Very eloquently stated, bravo!!

For the time being (and until such time as one of the truly amazing wizards who walks this forum figures out how to make Win98 work with IPv6), I will be banking on dencorso's router approach. (See his post near the top.)

Hopefully, we won't have to actually confront this issue for a while yet. But it will, sooner or later, and as the warnings seem to be getting more urgent, I guess it's time to start figuring out how to deal with the situation when it comes up.

--JorgeA

[JorgeA]

wsxedcrfv, on 17 August 2010 - 04:56 PM, said:

I would think that the vast majority of people that are home or SOHO internet users will have (or be given) new DSL or cable modems by their ISP's that are IPv6 aware (on the WAN side) and perform NAT translation to IPv4 IP address's on their LAN side. So any equipment on the LAN side theoretically wouldn't need to know anything about IPv6 - unless ...

Unless a machine tries to perform a DNS lookup on a domain or website and an IPv6 address is returned as the result (does this happen now?).

Are there any DNS queries right now that will return an IPv6 result?

What happens when a client with an IPv6 IP address tries to access a web-site where the server is not IPv6-aware? Does the client get an error (404 - website not available) ? How would the server log the transaction (what IP address would the server end up recording) ?

wsxedcrfv,

Excellent questions all; I wish I knew enough to provide an answer, even a speculative one.

Hopefully your questions won't be overlooked, and someone who knows (or can know) will address them.

--JorgeA

[Mijzelf]

dencorso, on 17 August 2010 - 12:27 PM, said:

JorgeA, on 17 August 2010 - 11:27 AM, said:

Tell me that I'm worrying too much.

You're worrying too much!!! The simplest solution is to use a router to translate IPv6 to IPv4. It just works!

dencorso, do you have actually seen a router work which does ipv6 on wan and ipv4 on lan? I think it's very difficult, maybe impossible, to implement. The problem is the size of the routing table, and the number of available ipv4 addresses. When a big hosting server changes to ipv6, it doesn't have to use virtual servers anymore. Instead it can assign all it's domains a unique ip address.
Which means, worst case, that the router has to map an ipv4 address on each domain visited, and remember this mapping virtually forever, but at least for a few hours, because it doesn't know if it's cached somewhere in the lan.
So the mapping table can grow *very* big, and it can even hit the limit of available ip4 mappings, because there are more ipv6 addresses outside than mappable ipv4 addresses inside.

This could solved by running a http proxy server on the router, but this works only for http.

[Queue]

Mijzelf, on 18 August 2010 - 05:31 AM, said:

So the mapping table can grow *very* big, and it can even hit the limit of available ip4 mappings, because there are more ipv6 addresses outside than mappable ipv4 addresses inside.

The IPv4 address space can handle 4,294,967,296 addresses. Do you really think a single desktop computer will ever connect to that many unique addresses in its lifetime, let alone within the period of time such addresses would need to be cached?

Queue

[Mijzelf]

Queue, on 18 August 2010 - 01:29 PM, said:

Mijzelf, on 18 August 2010 - 05:31 AM, said:

...

The IPv4 address space can handle 4,294,967,296 addresses. Do you really think a single desktop computer will ever connect to that many unique addresses in its lifetime, let alone within the period of time such addresses would need to be cached?

Depending on the implementation of the mapping table there are 'only' 16 million IPv4 adresses to burn. When transparantly implementing the ipv4-in-ipv6 encapsulation, you can only use a (or all) private range, because the other addresses can still be used, outside.
Of course it's possible to just map the outside ipv4 address to another ipv4 address inside, (which will not give the full address space, you cannot use the reserved ranges), but it will break software which uses hardcoded ipv4 outside addresses. (Or softcoded, like manually configured DNS servers).

Can a single desktop computer burn 16 million IPv4 addresses in a few hours? I don't know. When you search the forums you will find a lot of people suffering from instable internet because their router cannot handle the hundreds of connections generated by p2p networking. Further you can read about plans to distribute (hired) movies via p2p, and maybe even stream via p2p.
Nobody could have predicted that a normal consumer now can have several hundreds of connections at a given moment. I wouldn't be surprised if in the near future the same costumer will be burning 16 million addresses in a few hours.

[cyberformer]

I've been contemplating the possible scenarios which could likely occur, in reference to the "router" aspect of things, especially as it relates to something bought up by wsxedcrfv, who said:
"I would think that the vast majority of people that are home or SOHO internet users will have (or be given) new DSL or cable modems by their ISP's that are IPv6 aware (on the WAN side) and perform NAT translation to IPv4 IP address's on their LAN side. So any equipment on the LAN side theoretically wouldn't need to know anything about IPv6 - unless ..."

Would not these new routers have to have Win 9x drivers?
What is the likelihood that such service providers would be so kind to do such a thing?
The only thing that could possibly prompt such a possibility, would be for them to arrive at the decision that there are enough Win Me, Win 98, and Win 95 users---to make it worth their while as a company---to provide such routers? What is the chance of that?
Do not get me wrong, I would fervently hope, that wsxedcrfv would be quite right!
But the sad trend, seems to be less and less software, hardware, and drivers for our 9x systems---as time goes on, unless something exceedingly strange should manifest itself.

[Cyker]

I'm also worried about all the IPv4 hardware (Palms, printers, cameras, NAS' etc.).

In theory, it should be possible to NAT from IPv6 <-> IPv4, as we used to use IPX/SPX<->TCP/IP NAT routers in my university (*sniff* I miss IPX!), but IPv6 is such a mess that I think it will be glitchy, like in the old modem days when I used WinGate as a SOCKS proxy to share my modem connection!

There is no getting around it - Mass IPv6 deployment will break the 'net right now; Companies aren't thinking about inter-op scenarios atm; They just want to sell you IPv6 gear to replace all your IPv4 gear!

That said, I think you can access a lot of things using an IPv6-aware proxy, but there is a lot of stuff that won't work properly over a proxy, and obviously it requires your device/program support using a proxy, which many more obscure things (Which are usually the ones you need...) don't!

[cyberformer]

I am wondering if the following is practical.

This concept is derived from how an old PC, can have a Linux version installed to make it into a firewall.
Could one use a Linux version---that would turn an old PC into a router, which would then be the go between---between-- a 9x PC---and the Internet?
Either using an available Linux distribution, or a specific program which would allow for such a thing?

What about XP?
Can one "funnel" a dedicated 9x machine---through a dedicated XP machine---for Internet use?
Would this work in the worse case IPV6/9x possibility?

Is this a very far fetched scheme, or is it something that could indeed be done?

[Cyker]

It is possible to turn a Linux machine into a router, but AFAIK there is nothing in Linux for doing IPv4 <-> IPv6 NAT

I think you can use something like Squid to proxy web requests from an IPv4 interface to an IPv6 interface, but that's only really for http web stuff.

[Drugwash]

How easily this topic has been forgotten... Even by myself who already raised the question at some point in time. And now comes the time to do it again: while looking for a totally unrelated (or not?) thing, I stumbled into a press communicate released by my current Internet provider on October 10, 2011. In a nutshell, it states that RCD&RDS is the first operator in Romania to implement IPv6 for household clients, nationwide. In Novemeber, the program will be extended to business clients and by the end of 2011, the program will cover the whole country.

Now, I should back up a little and mention what I was looking for: it's the PPPoE driver for Win95/98, which has been available at some point from one of their servers, without which I couldn't have been able to connect to the wired network a few years ago at the old location. Well, the old address is not available anymore and my search has come up with no results.

Extrapolating a bit, I would bet my life that they will never distribute any Ipv6 to IPv4 routers or any similar equipment, because they follow the worldwide trend of "upgrade to latest", therefore their clients would either have to buy Windows Vista/7/8/etc, use a recent Linux distro or break the contract. Mind you, I've called their customer service 4-5 years ago and they totally declined any responsability versus Win9x clients.

Considering the above, would you still say "sit back and relax coz IPv6 is still far away"? The implications of this IPv6 being implemented on a worldwide scale are too huge to be discussed on a lite note. The link above mentions "printer, smartphone, tablet, smart TV, home theater PC, refrigerator, surveillance camera, NAS - Network Attached Storage, etc." as devices that will have their own external IP address... I know many will call me a paranoid, but when the day comes that the fridge locks itself because the Internet told it you have eaten too much at lunch, only then will you realize where this world has come to. By then, it would've been too late already.