Vista's role in Imminent Net Death overstated

Back in the late 1980s, long before the days of "All your base are belong
to us," there was an Internet catchphrase that was sweeping the virtual
landscape. It started shortly after universities opened up Internet access
to their students, swamping the fledgling network, and particularly the
Usenet discussion newsgroups, with hordes of new-and to the old-timers,
uncouth-users. Many predictions were made that the Internet could not
withstand the influx of so many people and that the infrastructure would
buckle and collapse. These dire warnings were made so often that it became
a standard Usenet meme to add "Imminent death of the Net predicted. Film at
11." to every post that was even remotely connected to something bad
happening.

Well, it looks like the Imminent Death of the Net craze is back, with the
publication of an article with the dire title of "Will Vista stall Net
traffic?" The article was based on statements by Paul Mockapetris, who was
part of the original team who invented the Domain Name Server (DNS) system
that translates URLs such as www.arstechnica.com into their corresponding
IP addresses. Mockapetris is concerned that when Windows Vista is launched,
the extra load it will put on DNS servers will overtax the system. "You're
going to see brownouts," he said in an interview. "All of a sudden, it is
going to be mud season on the Internet, where things will just be kind of
slow and gooey."

Microsoft, for their part, have responded in a statement that they do not
believe Vista will cause any serious problems for the Internet. Independent
researcher Dan Kaminsky said that "Vista, due to its support for IPv6, will
cause somewhat higher load on name servers as it checks to see which
protocol to use, but this is not the stuff that blackouts are made of."

The issue at hand is Vista's built-in support of the IPv6 network layer
protocol, in addition to the standard IPv4 protocol. IPv4 was proposed in
September 1981, and remains the standard for Internet traffic today. It
describes IP addresses using the familiar 255.255.255.255 notation, where
each number is an 8-bit integer from 0 to 255. This gave 32 bits to
describe all potential addresses, or 232, which is just under 4.3 billion
possible devices hooked to the Internet. This seemed like plenty in 1981,
but as banks of IP addresses were handed out it became clear that public
IPs would eventually run out. To extend the system, the concept of
non-routable IPs was added: 192.168.x.x, 10.x.x.x, and 172.16.x.x were
reserved for devices inside a private network, and thus everyone could use
these addresses without conflict. When devices had to connect to the
outside world, the idea of Network Address Translation (NAT) was
implemented to route requests from external addresses to internal ones.

Still, with the advent of broadband and wireless networks, as well as a
multitude of new devices wanting to get on the Internet, it became clear
that even this solution would not last. Thus IPv6 was created, which
extends the addressable space from 32 bits to 128 bits, or about 3.4 x
1038, which would provide over 800 addresses for every gram of matter on
the entire Earth, meaning it should last for the next few years. Vista adds
support for IPv6, but because very few severs on the Internet are running
IPv6 right now, it retains support for IPv4 and runs it at the same time.
This is the crux of the problem that Mockapetris is warning about. Each
time you visit a domain in Vista, it has to send a request to the DNS
server to see if the domain has an IPv6 address, then falls back to IPv4 if
it is not available. This doubling of requests could cause
already-overloaded DNS servers to slow down.

Mockapetris is obviously qualified to speak on the issue of DNS servers,
but it is important to remember that many of the old-school "Imminent Death
of the Net" predictions were also sparked by respected Internet authority
figures. They looked at growth projections and saw no way for the Net to
cope, but didn't factor in that companies would respond to growth
challenges by adding extra infrastructure. In addition, the release of
Windows Vista will not necessarily mean that the majority of the Internet
will instantly be flooding the servers with IPv6 requests. Every new
Microsoft OS release has taken time to become the majority of the installed
base-Windows XP took two-and-a-half years to reach the 50 percent mark.

So relax, the Internet isn't going anywhere. As it has so many times in the
past, it will adapt to the new demands being placed on it. And it will
remain true, as they used to say, that it's always September somewhere on
the Net.


Vista's role in Imminent Net Death overstated
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/pos...-7691.html

Ivan