# IPv6 support



## Yog

I think Tivo should add IPv6 support to its DVRs. 

It'd be a bit of work, since they'd probably have to update to a new kernel (or perhaps just reconfigure the version they're using and enable IPv6). The kernel would give them autoconfiguration capability, but they'd also have to support DHCPv6. They'd also have to update the UI to allow IPv6 addresses, etc, to be added. Also underlying changes to scripting and DNS resolution to allow IPv6, etc.

All in all it shouldn't be a huge undertaking, I wouldn't think. Netflix already supports IPv6. I'm sure other services will follow.


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## slydog75

What would we/they gain by doing this?


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## Yog

slydog75 said:


> What would we/they gain by doing this?


Glib answer: A future for our Tivos?

Ultimately IPv4 will run out, and we'll _need_ IPv6 (estimates vary, some as soon as 2011-2012). If our Tivos are stuck with IPv4 only, their ability to talk to sites on the internet will slowly dwindle. IPv6 is mature and has been available for years on most OS platforms (Windows 2000, XP, Vista, Win7, Various Windows server OS, Linux, BSD, etc). Tivo should too, especially seeing that it runs a Linux kernel (although I think it's still 2.4 even on the Tivo HD, but IPv6 is available for 2.4 too, just not sure how recent/supported it is).

Having the capability will simply future proof our current and future Tivos as far as internet connectivity, and won't be that difficult for Tivo to do. From a Tivo users perspective, nothing should really change as far as using the Tivo. (Much like using a computer doesn't really change much. When I browse to web site, the only way I know if it's an IPv6 site or IPv4 is because of a FF plugin I have which shows the IP address.)


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## slydog75

XP did IPv6? I thought that was introduced with Vista.


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## Yog

slydog75 said:


> XP did IPv6? I thought that was introduced with Vista.


I'm doing IPv6 on an XP box right now. You just have to install it by going into the network CPL.


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## Grandpasteve

Your TiVo talks to the Internet via your router and/or cable/dsl/FiOS modem.You should not need IPV6 for yor TiVo unless you run out of TCPIP addresses in your 192.168.x.x home network.


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## LostCluster

We've been "running out of IP addresses" for the past 10 years. Network Address Translation has proved as an easier solution than IPv6.

See, every computer/device in a house/office does not need a "real" Internet IP address. NAT allows there to be only one IP address at the site, and allows the edge router to have 64k ports, more than enough for all the applications even a large office needs open at one time.

And, since nearly every TiVo is on a muti-device home network, it's almost for certain it's going to get a 192.168.x.x or 10.x.x.x address. IPv4 lives on.


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## orangeboy

LostCluster said:


> We've been "running out of IP addresses" for the past 10 years. Network Address Translation has proved as an easier solution than IPv6.
> 
> See, every computer/device in a house/office does not need a "real" Internet IP address. NAT allows there to be only one IP address at the site, and allows the edge router to have 64k ports, more than enough for all the applications even a large office needs open at one time.
> 
> And, since nearly every TiVo is on a muti-device home network, it's almost for certain it's going to get a 192.168.x.x or 10.x.x.x address. IPv4 lives on.


I used to work for a corporation that used class b addresses, when class c would have easily sufficed. Some clearer thinking was done, and NAT was implemented. I'm pretty sure the entire netrange is still in use, with only a few "external" addresses being used. I think a little assessment and redistribution by IANA (or is it ARIN?) could clean up the IPv4 address space greatly. I'm sure it was a free-for-all back in the day when these IPv4 addresses seemed "limitless"...


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## Yog

Yes. I'm quite familiar with concepts of NAT (I'm a systems/network engineer). 

You guys don't seem to get it. Even _with_ NAT, IPv4 address space will be exhausted. NAT is a major reason why it hasn't been exhausted already. There's only a few netblocks left to be assigned to the RIRs. Once they're gone, only the RIRs have IP space to give out to ISPs in their regions. Once they're gone, only the ISPs have "what they have" to give to customers. ISPs will probably have to start doing things like carrier grade NAT at that point (that is, giving customers RFC1918 addresses instead of publics, and NATing at the ISP level). Or, they could just adopt IPv6 (Comcast already plans on rolling it out in the near future, and if they choose to give new customers IPv6 only, then IPv4 connectivity will likely be via things like NAT64 and Dual-Stack Lite).

Demand for IP space won't decrease. It will only increase. With increased use of BB connections, and IP on mobile phones, it will only aggravate it.

While there is plenty of debate on exactly when it will be depleted, why wait when there's a ready solution? Do we really want to wait until they become scarce and difficult to get and expensive before just going to IPv6?

And yes, we've been hearing about it "for the last 10 years". But that's because the engineers foresaw IPv4 depletion, and started working on a solution a long time ago (IPv6). And they've been warning people about it for years of course. Ten years ago, IPv4 exhaustion wasn't imminent as it is now. Now, we probably have anywhere from 2-5 years before it gets really bad.

Hopefully by then, most will already be on IPv6.

Anyway, some of you may want to do some reading on the subject:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv4_address_exhaustion
http://www.ipv6actnow.org/tag/ipv4-exhaustion/
http://www.ipv6.com/
http://www.ipv6.com/articles/general/Top-10-Features-that-make-IPv6-greater-than-IPv4.htm


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## westside_guy

Given that Tivo is based on the Linux kernel, and given that Tivo already incorporates support for Bonjour/Zeroconf - one would think incorporating IPv6 would be fairly trivial, at least as far as home networking goes.


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## MichaelK

here's the thing- why the rush- since the ISP's still aren't using it then why should Tivo be in a rush?

My router does IPv6 and my vista pc's and all I ever see is "limited connectivity" becasue comcast still isn't using IPv6 anyway. 

Are any of the big ISP's using it yet? 

If some are than probably tivo should get off the ball, but seems no one is at the moment so whats the rush?


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## MichaelK

actually - made myself wonder- are there routers/switches/whatever that do IPv6 on one side but than do some kind of NAT conversion to IPv4 on the other?


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## Grandpasteve

MichaelK said:


> actually - made myself wonder- are there routers/switches/whatever that do IPv6 on one side but than do some kind of NAT conversion to IPv4 on the other?


An example - a docsis 3.0 Cable modem should be IPV6 ready (so it can get an IPV6 address from your ISP) and be able to hand out an IPV4 address to your home router. Your typical home router can hand out up to 255 IPV4 addresses, although the default value is usually 50.

There is no need or IPV6 in the home.


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## Adam1115

since most residential internet accounts don't support ipv6, there is nothing to be gained by this.

AND even when they do, they'll have to run both IPv6 AND v4 to support all the IPv4 sites that don't have a v6 site. Since TiVo already owns IPv4 addresses, there is still nothing to be gained by this.


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## Yog

MichaelK said:


> here's the thing- why the rush- since the ISP's still aren't using it then why should Tivo be in a rush?
> 
> My router does IPv6 and my vista pc's and all I ever see is "limited connectivity" becasue comcast still isn't using IPv6 anyway.
> 
> Are any of the big ISP's using it yet?
> 
> If some are than probably tivo should get off the ball, but seems no one is at the moment so whats the rush?


http://www.internetnews.com/infra/article.phpr/3825696/Comcast+Embraces+IPv6.htm
http://www.networkworld.com/news/2008/072108-comcast-ipv6.html
(I also mentioned that Comcast was scheduled for IPv6 rollout in the last message ... guess you didn't see that.  Of course, there are also ISPs with IPv6 available now.)


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## Adam1115

Uhm, Yog, your second link explains exactly why TiVo doesn't NEED to support IPv4.


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## Yog

Adam1115 said:


> since most residential internet accounts don't support ipv6, there is nothing to be gained by this.
> 
> AND even when they do, they'll have to run both IPv6 AND v4 to support all the IPv4 sites that don't have a v6 site. Since TiVo already owns IPv4 addresses, there is still nothing to be gained by this.


EDIT: combined this quote into response.


Adam1115 said:


> Uhm, Yog, your second link explains exactly why TiVo doesn't NEED to support IPv4.


It's true that at the moment most residential ISPs don't have IPv6, many will in the near future. Comcast is supposedly scheduled to roll it out fairly soon.

Also, while many IPv6 users will be dual stack and have both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses, when IPv4s become scarce, there will be a time when new customers get IPv6 only. It really depends how many IPv4s a particular ISP has left, and what their policies are. In those cases, they will access the IPv4 internet via transition mechanisms such as NAT64/DNS64 and Dual-Stack Lite (DS-Lite ... Comcast most likely will use this).

NAT64/DNS64 works by faking IPv6 addresses in DNS AAAA responses which contain the IPv4 address of the real IPv4 site inside the IPv6 address (the entire IPv4 space can be easily contained in an Ipv6). Then the IPv6 packets are ultimately routed to a carrier grade NAT device (CGN) in your ISP where they are translated to public IPv4s to talk to the Ipv4 internet, and return traffic is translated back in similar fashion. Your IPv6 host has no idea it's talking to an IPv4 host.

DS-Lite works by tunneling IPv4 traffic in IPv6 packets via a tunnel interface, similar to 6in4 but in reverse. The traffic is tunneled to a CGN at your ISP which NATs your private IPv4s to a public IPv4s and talks to the IPv4 internet. It identifies your connection based on your tunnel particulars so it allows overlapping private IPv4s from different customers (neat eh?).

In the case of NAT64, each node will have to speak IPv6 natively to get to the IPv4 internet. DS-Lite will allow IPv4 only node on your LAN to talk to the IPv4 internet, even when you don't have a public IPv4 (since traffic can be tunneled via a router/cable modem w/ DS-Lite tunnel interface). So, as long as the ISP offers DS-Lite, you can still talk to the internet with IPv4 only nodes.

But if not, you'll have to figure something else out (like set up your own IPv4 tunnel to somewhere which has public IPv4s, etc). If you find yourself in this situation, and you cant get IPv4 connectivity at all, or don't have the knowledge or skills to "figure something out", then your Tivo becomes a paperweight. Well, I guess u can still make the daily call using the phone. 

And of course, both of these transition methods, and others being considered, wind up having to jump through hoops and go through NAT devices at your ISP, using a common set of public IPv4s for all customers to talk to the IPv4 internet. A bit messy. Potentially slow, etc.

Wouldn't it be nice if the Tivo simply spoke native IPv6 so it could talk to the IPv6 internet natively, especially when more and more IPv6 enabled sites start popping up?


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## Yog

Grandpasteve said:


> An example - a docsis 3.0 Cable modem should be IPV6 ready (so it can get an IPV6 address from your ISP) and be able to hand out an IPV4 address to your home router. Your typical home router can hand out up to 255 IPV4 addresses, although the default value is usually 50.
> 
> There is no need or IPV6 in the home.


In some ways true. If your ISP uses DS-Lite, you'll be able to talk to the IPv4 internet via that, but the IPv4 nodes won't be able to speak to IPv6 only nodes on the internet. Why not just add IPv6 to the Tivo so it can?


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## Yog

MichaelK said:


> here's the thing- why the rush- since the ISP's still aren't using it then why should Tivo be in a rush?


Define rush? I'm talking maybe the next year or two to get it done.



MichaelK said:


> actually - made myself wonder- are there routers/switches/whatever that do IPv6 on one side but than do some kind of NAT conversion to IPv4 on the other?


Read my above message and some of the links. There are transition methods that will be employed, all with their own "issues" of course. And some as yet unimplemented/untested. There are even some IETF drafts for IPv4 only nodes to be able to talk to IPv6 via some sort of translation. But these are all comparatively messy compared to native IPv6.

Native IPv6 would just be ... simpler.


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## Yog

westside_guy said:


> Given that Tivo is based on the Linux kernel, and given that Tivo already incorporates support for Bonjour/Zeroconf - one would think incorporating IPv6 would be fairly trivial, at least as far as home networking goes.


Getting the OS level support for IPv6 would be the "easy" part. With that you'd get autoconfiguration, and it'd be pretty easy to add a DHCPv6 client to it I imagine. I think Tivo still uses a 2.4 kernel on the HD models (not positive about this), but even 2.4 has IPv6 support, although I don't know it it has ip6tables, etc available to it. (all of my IPv6 linux boxes are kernel 2.6).

The harder part will probably be going through all the UI code, adding UI stuff for IPv6, going through all the scripts and software which deals with IP addresses and making sure it groks both types, changing the network code to use the IPv6 API (the IPv6 sockets API supports IPv4 listens/connects via the IPv4 mapped IPv6 addresses trick, i.e. ::ffff:a.b.c.d type addresses) or both APIs, everywhere where it listens/connects, etc. Adding ip6tables firewall stuff. A lot of little odds and ends.

It'd be a bit of work, I think. They're eventually going to have to do it one way or another though.


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## lrhorer

Yog is perfectly correct. There are a large number of advantages to IPV6, well over and above the limits on the number of IP addresses. For one thing, NAT becomes a thing of the past. So do netmasks and LAN segments. Every internet portal gets a full 64 bit network address, which means every end user - commercial or otherwise - gets 18 quintillion addresses for one's own use, compared to the /30 most people get now with 1 host address, 1 default gateway address, 1 loopback address, and 1 broadcast address. Attempts to sniff an organization's address space become completely futile, and DOS attacks become far more difficult. With IPV4, each small end user eats up 4 IP addresses, effectively cutting the 4 billion available IP addresses down to not much more than a billion. Of course, some corporate entities (other than ISPs) do still retain somewhat larger address spaces, but with the huge proliferation of NAT gateways, most of the portals are now /30, reducing the total number of routable addresses by a factor of 4 (but vastly increasing the number of subnets).

While it is true we won't actually exhaust the IPV4 address space for another year or so, the number of systems with IPV6 addresses is going to grow rapidly, and sooner, rather than later, the number of IPV6 only systems is going to expand explosively, and the number of unreachable sites is going to blossom. It only requires 1 critical site to become unreachable for a user before it becomes imperative to upgrade. Upgrading the TiVos to IPV6 is not going to be difficult for TiVo, and it will be seamless for TiVo users, so there's really no big reason not to implement IPV6 soon.


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## wmcbrine

lrhorer said:


> every end user - commercial or otherwise - gets 18 quintillion addresses for one's own use


I guess that would hold me for a few more years.


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## lrhorer

orangeboy said:


> I used to work for a corporation that used class b addresses, when class c would have easily sufficed. Some clearer thinking was done, and NAT was implemented. I'm pretty sure the entire netrange is still in use, with only a few "external" addresses being used. I think a little assessment and redistribution by IANA (or is it ARIN?)


It used to be the NIC. Now, I believe it is ARIN for North America.



orangeboy said:


> could clean up the IPv4 address space greatly.


Not so much. All the class A and class B addresses have been relinquished, and the number of networks is growing by leaps and bounds daily. As I already mentioned, once virtually all the subnets have been converted to /30 networks, we're only left with about a billion routable IP addresses. Given all the households and businesses coming online around the world today, 1 billion is not all that many.



orangeboy said:


> I'm sure it was a free-for-all back in the day when these IPv4 addresses seemed "limitless"...


Those days are long past. IP addresses became classless over a decade ago, and even most fairly large businesses today only purchase a /30 or maybe a /28 from their internet provider for their gateways unless they are ISPs. It's fairly unusual for a company to purchase even a /24 these days.


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## lrhorer

wmcbrine said:


> I guess that would hold me for a few more years.


Even if not, with 18 quintillion available networks, getting a second one won't be too difficult. They'll look at you like you have seven heads, but I expect they wouldn't quibble, even if you asked for 1000 networks. Every person on Earth could easily be assigned 1 billion IPV6 networks, each containing 18 quintillion addresses. We could nearly assign a separate IP address to every single molecule in the Earth.


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## lrhorer

Yog said:


> The harder part will probably be going through all the UI code, adding UI stuff for IPv6


Not much of the UI is concerned with IP addresses. It's a pretty narrowly defined UI, after all.



Yog said:


> going through all the scripts and software which deals with IP addresses


There's even less of that. To most intents and purposes, there is really only 1 userspace application running on the TiVo, and that is tivoapp. It provides a tcl shell and of course interacts with the various devices, including the codecs and what have you. I think maybe the web server and the NTP server are separate applications, but the bottom line is the TiVo isn't a general purpose PC, and the number of binaries is quite limited, as are the protocols used by those binaries. Converting the relatively few Layer III aware binaries to IPV6 isn't going to be a massive project for them.



Yog said:


> and making sure it groks both types, changing the network code to use the IPv6 API (the IPv6 sockets API supports IPv4 listens/connects via the IPv4 mapped IPv6 addresses trick, i.e. ::ffff:a.b.c.d type addresses) or both APIs, everywhere where it listens/connects, etc. Adding ip6tables firewall stuff. A lot of little odds and ends.


The engineering devil is always in the details, of course, but I suspect creating MFS-64 was much more of a challenge than IPV6.


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## Yog

lrhorer said:


> Even if not, with 18 quintillion available networks, getting a second one won't be too difficult. They'll look at you like you have seven heads, but I expect they wouldn't quibble, even if you asked for 1000 networks. Every person on Earth could easily be assigned 1 billion IPV6 networks, each containing 18 quintillion addresses. We could nearly assign a separate IP address to every single molecule in the Earth.


With IPv6, it's not even that difficult to get a /48. For instance, HE's tunnel broker assigns you a single routeable /64, but with a mouse click, they'll assign you a /48. Subnet-wise a /48 is the equivalent of an IPv4 /8, with 65,536 usable subnets, but instead of the 64K subnets being /24s of 254 hosts each, they're /64s with ~18.4 billion-billion hosts (quintillion ... but I think billion-billion sounds cooler  ).



lrhorer said:


> Yog said:
> 
> 
> 
> The harder part will probably be going through all the UI code, adding UI stuff for IPv6
> 
> 
> 
> Not much of the UI is concerned with IP addresses. It's a pretty narrowly defined UI, after all.
Click to expand...

Yeh I suppose there's really only one spot in the UI which needs to be changed. But they might need to add some other things like preferences for IPv4 vs. IPv6 (functional equiv of ip addrlist/gai.conf), etc.



lrhorer said:


> Yog said:
> 
> 
> 
> going through all the scripts and software which deals with IP addresses
> 
> 
> 
> There's even less of that. To most intents and purposes, there is really only 1 userspace application running on the TiVo, and that is tivoapp. It provides a tcl shell and of course interacts with the various devices, including the codecs and what have you. I think maybe the web server and the NTP server are separate applications, but the bottom line is the TiVo isn't a general purpose PC, and the number of binaries is quite limited, as are the protocols used by those binaries. Converting the relatively few Layer III aware binaries to IPV6 isn't going to be a massive project for them.
Click to expand...

From "glancing around", I've seen that Tivo has quite a bit of little TCL scripts and such. Not sure how many of them deal with networking, but of the ones which do, they'll have to be able to deal with IPv6, mostly insofar as not making presumptions that if the address is a dotted quad and stuff like that if they deal with IP addresses. Anything that does listens or connects will have to have some code changes though. Scripts which just get handed a file descriptor or whatever shouldn't have to be changed.



lrhorer said:


> Yog said:
> 
> 
> 
> and making sure it groks both types, changing the network code to use the IPv6 API (the IPv6 sockets API supports IPv4 listens/connects via the IPv4 mapped IPv6 addresses trick, i.e. ::ffff:a.b.c.d type addresses) or both APIs, everywhere where it listens/connects, etc. Adding ip6tables firewall stuff. A lot of little odds and ends.
> 
> 
> 
> The engineering devil is always in the details, of course, but I suspect creating MFS-64 was much more of a challenge than IPV6.
Click to expand...

Exactly. The devil is in the details. I try to be a bit conservative and not presume it's going to be a trivial thing.


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## Adam1115

The solution?

Instead of ARIN just selling IP's like crazy until we run dry, they need to jack the price up to reflect the lack of supply.

Once it is much more expensive to get IPv4 addresses people will be much more interested in IPv6.

Right now, virtually anyone can get a /28 for about $10/mo. Heck, I even have one at my house.


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## lrhorer

Yog said:


> Yeh I suppose there's really only one spot in the UI which needs to be changed. But they might need to add some other things like preferences for IPv4 vs. IPv6 (functional equiv of ip addrlist/gai.conf), etc.


Exactly.



Yog said:


> From "glancing around", I've seen that Tivo has quite a bit of little TCL scripts and such.


It looks like about 163 .tcl scripts in 11.0d.



Yog said:


> Not sure how many of them deal with networking, but of the ones which do, they'll have to be able to deal with IPv6, mostly insofar as not making presumptions that if the address is a dotted quad and stuff like that if they deal with IP addresses. Anything that does listens or connects will have to have some code changes though. Scripts which just get handed a file descriptor or whatever shouldn't have to be changed.


That's right.



Yog said:


> Exactly. The devil is in the details. I try to be a bit conservative and not presume it's going to be a trivial thing.


"What's life without a few challenges?", I always say.


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## wgc

My $0.02 to turn about some of these arguments:
- For those saying that it's hard to find consumer electronics that support IPv6 ... true, but would you rather TiVo be known as one of the trendsetters or one of the obsoletes?
- For those saying we don't need it yet ... true, but what about five years from now? Isn't that supposed to be the average lifetime of a unit? Many of us have a TiVo at least that old.
- For those who believe NAT is simpler ... true, but wouldn't you prefer early adopters like Yog help work out the details rather than you have to deal with the buggy first approaches?


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## Grandpasteve

wgc said:


> My $0.02 to turn about some of these arguments:
> - For those saying that it's hard to find consumer electronics that support IPv6 ... true, but would you rather TiVo be known as one of the trendsetters or one of the obsoletes?
> - For those saying we don't need it yet ... true, but what about five years from now? Isn't that supposed to be the average lifetime of a unit? Many of us have a TiVo at least that old.
> - For those who believe NAT is simpler ... true, but wouldn't you prefer early adopters like Yog help work out the details rather than you have to deal with the buggy first approaches?


As it stands, TiVo does not connect to the Internet, it connects to my home network, which connects to the Internet using a modem. If there is ever a need for Tivo to be connected directly to the Internet, then it might need IPV6, but until that happens, there is no need for it.

There may be a need in the near future for my ISP to provide an IPV6 address for my modem, but that does not affect my home network.


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## lrhorer

Grandpasteve said:


> As it stands, TiVo does not connect to the Internet, it connects to my home network, which connects to the Internet using a modem. If there is ever a need for Tivo to be connected directly to the Internet, then it might need IPV6, but until that happens, there is no need for it.


That's simply not true. First of all, if you will look at every single packet from your TiVo destined for any address outside your LAN, you will see it has a perfectly valid routable internet address. The fact the router, via NAT, translates every incoming packet's destination address to an non-routable address and every outbound packet's non-routable source address to a routable source address is not relevant. The correct routable internet source address must be on every packet the TiVo receives from outside the firewall, and the correct routable destination IP address must reside on every packet headed from the TiVo to the internet. 'No exceptions. If the internet address with which the TiVo wishes to communicate is not a 32 bit IPV4 address, then you are hosed, period.



Grandpasteve said:


> There may be a need in the near future for my ISP to provide an IPV6 address for my modem, but that does not affect my home network.


This is incorrect. First of all, NAT itself is going to be going away, although it doesn't really hurt anything to have it enabled even on an IPV6 network. It just serves little or no purpose. The simple fact is - firewall modem or not - an IPV4 host is going to have real challenges communicating with an IPV6 host which does not also have an IPV4 address. For the time being, we can still employ various work-arounds, but those work-arounds are going to get harder and harder pressed to maintain connectivity everywhere. Various proxy solutions and multiple network addresses are only going to work ubiquitously for a fairly short time until large holes start to open up in the address space.


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## Yog

Adding to Irhorer comments ...

If Tivos remain an IPv4 only device, the only solution I know of which would allow it to talk to the IPv4 internet in the case where your ISP only gives you only an IPv6 (e.g. you are on a IPv6 "island" ... a real future possibility) is Dual-Stack Lite.

All the other IPv6 <-> IPv4 transition mechanisms I know of (such as TRT, NAT64) presume that your host can speak IPv6 natively, and represents the IPv4 internet as fake-prefix IPv6 addresses. Perhaps there are others I don't know of (I don't know much about IVI, perhaps this allows native IPv4 only hosts to speak to IPv6 hosts and transit an IPv6 only network to speak to other IPv4s?). But if this is the case, your ISP will either have to provide IPv4 via DS-Lite, or the end user will have to come up with his own solution (manually configured IPv4 in IPv6 tunnel perhaps).

So IMHO, over the next year or two, it'd be in Tivo's best interest to support IPv6. If not on current ones, then certainly on a future model (although if a future model supports it, a "back-port" to current models would seem to be a no brainer).


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## MichaelK

help out a layman- I'm trying to understand-

so you guys are saying that all the IPv4 equipment is going to be worthless shortly (in a mater of single digit years)? I was under the impression that newer cablemodems and whatnot were going to be able to allow our older IPv4 devices to connect to the IPv6 internet through some flavor of nat?

Seems what lrhorer is saying is that the IPv4 devices will be able to connect to other IPv4 hosts with IPv6 in the middle but they wont have the abilit to getto IPv6 ONLY hosts that might show up in the future? Is that the real issue?

So I'd ask for a device like a tivo that has limited hosts it needs to connect to tivo and it's content partners and our home networks- as long as Tivo and their content partners can run on IPv4 hosts then is there a problem?

I know current computers and most recent vintages are fine and could do IPv6. Is everything else currently getting built (blue ray players, connected Tv's, etc.) all being done IPv6?

Can you run IPv6 and IPv4 on the same device at the same time? Why isn't comcast overlaying IPv6? (or are they but my particular cable modem is older so is only doing IPV4?)


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## Jonathan_S

MichaelK said:


> Seems what lrhorer is saying is that the IPv4 devices will be able to connect to other IPv4 hosts with IPv6 in the middle but they wont have the abilit to getto IPv6 ONLY hosts that might show up in the future? Is that the real issue?
> 
> So I'd ask for a device like a tivo that has limited hosts it needs to connect to tivo and it's content partners and our home networks- as long as Tivo and their content partners can run on IPv4 hosts then is there a problem?


That's basically my understanding of the issue.
Obviously TiVo's current servers and content partners all have IPv4 addresses which they're unlikely to give up anytime soon.

But this could basically limit _future_ content partners to people who can offer an IPv4 addressable server.


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## lrhorer

MichaelK said:


> help out a layman- I'm trying to understand-
> 
> so you guys are saying that all the IPv4 equipment is going to be worthless shortly (in a mater of single digit years)?


Well, first of all, most devices can have their firmware upgraded. IPV6 does not require anything special in the way of hardware. Secondly, it may be an overstatement to say such a device will be worthless. It still will be able to connect to a significant fraction of the internet, but day by day that fraction will get smaller and smaller.



MichaelK said:


> I was under the impression that newer cablemodems and whatnot were going to be able to allow our older IPv4 devices to connect to the IPv6 internet through some flavor of nat?


IPV4 hosts will stil be able to talk freely to IPV4 hosts, just not directly to IPV6 hosts.



MichaelK said:


> Seems what lrhorer is saying is that the IPv4 devices will be able to connect to other IPv4 hosts with IPv6 in the middle but they wont have the abilit to getto IPv6 ONLY hosts that might show up in the future? Is that the real issue?


That's about right.



MichaelK said:


> So I'd ask for a device like a tivo that has limited hosts it needs to connect to tivo and it's content partners and our home networks- as long as Tivo and their content partners can run on IPv4 hosts then is there a problem?


The gateways need to have IPV4 addresses, but IPV4 addresses are getting just as scarce for gateways as for end user hosts.



MichaelK said:


> I know current computers and most recent vintages are fine and could do IPv6. Is everything else currently getting built (blue ray players, connected Tv's, etc.) all being done IPv6?


I don't really know, but see mu comment above about upgrading firmware.



MichaelK said:


> Can you run IPv6 and IPv4 on the same device at the same time?


Sure.



MichaelK said:


> Why isn't comcast overlaying IPv6? (or are they but my particular cable modem is older so is only doing IPV4?)


You would have to ask Comcast.


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## MichaelK

thanks for clarifying for me. I think i get it now.



lrhorer said:


> ...
> The gateways need to have IPV4 addresses, but IPV4 addresses are getting just as scarce for gateways as for end user hosts.
> ....


well all but a gateway. What's a gateway?

My limited understanding is that there are clients and servers and they connect through switches and routers? And somewhere along the line there's a DNS server that the client might need to check in with if the server it wants to talk has a name instead of an IP number address.

so where does a gateway come in?

(no need to laugh and point- I'm clueless  )


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## wgc

MichaelK said:


> well all but a gateway. What's a gateway?
> 
> My limited understanding is that there are clients and servers and they connect through switches and routers?


A gateway is a router.

Specifically, your gateway is the router that handles all network traffic going to and from the internet. It needs to be reachable from the internet so needs to respond to whichever protocol your ISP is using (IPv4? IPv6?) on a valid routable IP address.


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