Linode Launches Native IPv6 Support
Over the past 25 years the Internet has experienced astronomical growth – far more than the original architects imagined. As a result, the pools of unallocated IPv4 blocks have been accelerating toward exhaustion. In fact, on February 3rd, 2011 the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) allocated the remaining pool of addresses equally among the five Regional Internet Registries thereby completely depleting the source of IPs available under IPv4. Consequently, it has become vital for all Internet stakeholders to get serious about migrating to IPv6.
IPv4 was released in 1981 as a 32-bit range that provided roughly 4.3 billion IP addresses. Unfortunately, in just a few years, the protocol was identified to have scalability problems under the Classful Network architecture it employed at the time. As a result, the IETF was formed in 1991 and replaced the previous addressing architecture with Classless Inter-Domain Routing (CIDR) with the goal of slowing the growth of routing tables across the Internet and ultimately the depletion of IPv4 addresses.
With IPv4 address exhaustion inevitable, in 1998 the IETF announced a new protocol known as IPv6. This new protocol uses 128 bit addresses capable of supporting 340 undecillion addresses. To put that into context it amounts to: the existing Internet times the Internet times the Internet times the Internet worth of addresses.
Obviously this allows for many more devices on the network and while also eliminating the need for Network Address Translation (NAT).
However, adoption of IPv6 has been pitifully slow. In fact, according to a recent study by Arbor Networks, IPv6 represents less than 1% of all IP traffic seen on the Internet and very few cloud hosting providers have stepped up to help make this necessary transition possible for their subscribers.
The essence of the problem comes down to this: service providers don’t want IPv6 because there is no subscriber demand, subscribers don’t want it due to lack of content, and the content providers don’t want it unless there are subscribers. Nevertheless, the tipping point for the transition is around the corner and it is better to begin testing and migrating now rather than being left out in the game of IPv4 musical chairs. We don’t want to be part of the problem.
Linode – part of the solution
While this industry-wide problem has been challenging, Linode has accelerated its efforts towards IPv6 adoption. Subsequently, Linode is proud to announce today native IPv6 support. This will be a phased roll-out across the facilities, starting with immediate availability in Fremont, Newark in a week or so, followed by Dallas. For current IPv6 availability please see the Linode IPv6 Status and Frequently Asked Questions page which will be maintained here: http://www.linode.com/IPv6/.
Enjoy!
UPDATE 2011-05-05 – Newark online and IPv6 Pools available
UPDATE 2011-05-26 – Dallas is now IPv6 enabled!
UPDATE 2011-05-31 – There’s now an ‘Enable IPv6’ link on your Linode’s Remote Access subtab.
UPDATE 2011-12-20 – London and Atlanta IPv6 Enabled – blog post.
UPDATE 2012-02-28 – IPv6 Available Everywhere! – blog post.
Filed under: features, linode, announcements by caker
Awesome work, Linode. My IPv6 request ticket for my Fremont Linode was resolved in less than 1 minute, I kid you not.
All set up and my site is serving via IPv6 now.
Dang. The original announcement said it would be about a week before IPv6 would be available in Newark and it only took 48 hours. That’s great turnaround.
@ Keith
I don’t know what to make of your rambling so I will just ignore it.
@linode
It appears that the ipv6 page has been updated to include more information.
http://www.linode.com/IPv6/
> * Can I get more than one IPv6 address?
> Absolutely. Additional IPv6 addresses are free.
> snip
> We are also working on the ability to have an entire /64 subnet routed to one of your IPv6 addresses – even one of the Pool addresses, which means you can fail over the entire subnet. Stay tuned!
This is great news!
😀
great
looking forward to it
thanks
YAY for free IPv6! This was already a great announcement. With that update I’m even more thrilled!
Now if Dallas would just come online… 
I’m glad to see that Linode address pools are free now! This is why I’ve been so happy with Linode–they actually listen to their customers. Unfortunately I can’t say that about all of my hosting providers.
Whats this whole /64 and /128 etc? are the /128 IPs longer?
I don’t see the issue with Linode only giving out /128’s
/128 = 1 address,
/64 = 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 IPv6 addresses
Do you realisticly believe you need that many IPs by default? If Linode assigns /64’s to everyone (given they have an /48) they can only assign 65,536 LAN segments (/64’s)
And for default routing, I would think Linode would be assigning a /64 to the rack or host machine, and assign /128’s out of that /64.
At most, I could see a user needing 4 maybe 6 IPs on one box.
Ref: http://www.ripe.net/images/cidr_working41.jpg
IPv6 addressing scheme sux, it’s not clear, IPv4 makes sense. It always made sense. IPv6 addressing looks like it was dreamt up by an alien.
Thanks Linode for staying on top of this I might have to learn it in 10 years or so, we will need a pool of experts, from the responses, sounds like there are already some.
Can I still keep my IPv4 address alongside IPv6.
Linode rocks big time! 😀
Hi,
Any news on when Dallas will get IPv6?
P.S. I’m in the group that finds it dissapointing you don’t get a /64. My home broadband line has a /48 and my colo server has a /48. Both free of course…
Henrik, I think they dropped the pricing for additional ipv6 addresses:
http://www.linode.com/IPv6/#can-i-get-more-than-one-ipv6-address
Tyrael
On the IPv6 status page, Dallas is listed as “soon”. Is that weeks or 1-2 months, or much longer? I might migrate to a different data center depending on the timescale, but if it’s not a long time, I’d just wait it out…
IPv6 works great, thanks!
Will you be adding AAAA records for your nameservers ns{1,2,3,4,5}.linode.com sometime soon (at least those nameservers in v6-enabled datacentres)?
Looking forward to IPv6 roll-out in London!
Josh Altemoos, Linode has a /30, which is over 250,000 /48s or 17 billion /64s. IPv6 has a lot of features that simplify network management, but they were designed with /64 as the basic unit of allocation. The low 64 bits are intended to be used as an interface identifier. RFC 6177 recommends that even *home users* receive “significantly more than a single /64”, suggesting /56 as a nice round number.
I’m not sure why there is so much complaining about receiving a /128 by default. That is the nature of sharing a network segment in IPv6. Everyone on a single network segment shares the same /64 (in the usual most simple deployment case).
I think that designating blocks of /116 address space within the /64 subnet is a great way of providing blocks of useful addresses without growing your routing table.
The only downside is that you as a user can’t assign an address with ::dead:beef:cafe in the low bits of your address. I’m sure we can forgive Linode for that limitation can’t we?
[…] has recently added native IPv6 support to many of its data centers. Linode hosts the VPS that runs this blog, and it happens to reside in […]
My linode is in Atlanta, and as a networking guy, I’m really interested in getting my services ipv6-ready native as soon as possible. I held off setting up a tunnel when I moved there, and now that I see that ipv6 native is on it’s way, that’s of course *much* better….
So: Is there any ETA, or a honest reply on what the issue with Atlanta is? This is just input for me to decide whether a tunnel in the intermediate timeframe is worth it, or if we can expect ipv6 this year or some time not too far into next year?
It’s not important per se, just nice to have, so I might hold off for a year.
Re: Atlanta
I read somewhere, maybe in a forum or something, that the wait is for the Atlanta data center to get IPv6 capability. And the reason there is no E.T.A. is because the provider of the Atlanta data center has not given an E.T.A. for IPv6 connectivity.
The Atlanta data center’s status has been updated to “INTERNAL TESTING”, can’t wait!
Hope to see IPv6 at London DC in Q4-2011
When will Tokyo has IPv6 support?
I’m looking forward to IPv6 at the Atlanta datacenter!