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The DoD goal is to complete the transition to IPv6 for all inter and intra networking across the DoD by FY 2008.

China selected IPv6 as mandatory for CNGI

Any many more anouncements have been made, including this morning: Eur7m funding for the project Akogrimo The initiative will aim to develop an IPv6-based framework that allows mobile operators to use grid technology to provide new services and functions for businesses and citizens in an increasingly wireless world.

Have a look at http://www.hs247.com for a list of IPv6 Applications, News & Links.

You should be able to find a use for the tunnel.

For those who think IPv4 NAT is good enough, these are the drawbacks as compared with IPv6:

1) NAT breaks the end-to-end connection model of IP
2) NAT keeps a stateful connection table. If a NAT device is rebooted or looses its' configuration, the connection mappings are lost.
3) NAT prohibits end-to-end security as the IP header can't be modified.
4) If you use a 10.0.0.0/8 on one end of a network, and want to connect via NAT to another 10.0.0.0/8 network, you can't do it. Imagine connecting to a friends nat'd device when it uses the same IP schema as you use.
5) Servers on the NAT subnet can't use the same external port (say 80). Externally, they must map to 80 and 81. If the number of servers in the NAT network is large, you can easily run out of NAT IP TCP/UDP Ports.

NAT is good, but IPv6 is better.

Bring on IPv6. Check out HS247 for more information.

Last year i did a research paper on IPv6 for my data communications class. People, those who think IPv6 is dumb, unecessary, or already dead, pull your head from where the sun ain't shining and take a look at what it has to offer, you might consider giving some RFC's a read, that is unless your a pussy, and if thats the case, why do you read /. ?

IPv6 RFCs

It offers some really neat, and much need security imporovements, like secure hashing, encryption at the IP level(data link layer) and seriously, there is no longer a need for DHCP. It is a network administrators dream come true, now if only people would start using it...

Sorry for being an anonymous coward, i haven't posted in so long, i forget my userid...

We're already out of addresses - why add more in wireless space? IPv6 has many features that allow for efficient autodiscovery of other nodes, transition mechanisms to move easily from IPv4, multicasting capabilities, etc.

Let's drop this 192.168.x.x and 10.x.x.x stuff and just give everybody their own address. Multiple addresses can easily be used on a single interface as well.

Just something to think about when you want to design something yourself. If you don't want it to make itself extinct in the next few years, think about integrating IPv6 at the outset. It _is_ widespread technology just waiting to happen.

Links:

IPv6.org
hs247.com
freenet6.net
6bone.net

For more reasons on why IPv6 is so cool, and some of the neat things it can do (especially in the field of mesh-wireless, check out some of the technical details here.

I've been messing around with IPv6 for a couple years, and reading about it for a couple more, which still puts me behind the curve a bit. Bottom line is this is really new stuff, and the kind of basic information out there is just that, basic, in the same way assembler is basic (though not as basic as straight machine code). There is very little in the way of easy to follow directions, let alone complete network stacks and applications to make use of them. If you want a (mostly) complete IPv6 stack, go with BSD.

The best web resource i've found for linux specific information is a HOWTO by Peter Bieringer. It's located at http://www.bieringer.de/linux/IPv6/index.html

http://www.hs247.com/ Has a bunch of links to a ton of information, and is OS agnostic.

One book I've found to be pretty helpful is called IPng and the TCP/IP protocols: Implementing the Next Generation Internet. The first half of the book rambles a bit, but the second half gets down to business quite nicely. It can be a bit technical at points, which I like, but may be a dry for some.

O'Reilly has a good article on 6to4 tunneling at http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2001/06/01/ipv6 _tutorial.html. The specifics are BSD oriented, but the concepts apply everywhere.

If you want to start writing some code that uses IPv6, the ever popular UNIX Network Programming is a great resource.

Works fine on Solaris, BSD, Linux, Windows 2K, Windows XP, Windows 95/98/ME (with Trumpet WinSock) as far as I know, and its already here. I use it everyday. As for its uses, one of the nice things is that their is no such concept of private address space... its just a matter of where things are routed. I suggest you visit HS247 for more details. To be fair though, you Yanks are behind the times, IPv6 does seem way more developer in Europe

The following list will keep you occupied about IPv6 for some time... oh just for the record ams-ix is doing NATIVE IPv6 since 1998 now... alongside NSPIXP6 and PAIX and some others to be found at v6nap.net.

First two nice repositories where you can find almost anything IPv6 related:
IPv6 News and Links (hs247)
Open Directory Project Computers/Internet/Protocols/IP/IPng/

And some others important ones which can also be found there:
6bone
Belnet
Bieringer's Linux IPv6 FAQ
Euronet Belgium
IPng
KAME
Kitame's Debian IPv6 Packages
Microsoft IPv6
PuTTY IPv6
SiXXS
Sun Solaris IPv6
Surfnet IPv6
Trumpet IPv6

IPv6 for the future (or something advocating like that :)

You really think that there are only uni users using IPv6? No way! There are numerous _free_, automatic Tunnelbrokers (see http://www.hs247.com which allows every kiddie to have their 0wn 31337 tunnel (yes, those :dead:beef). Sadly, some (ab)users doesn't even know what ipv6 is, just they are happy that they have 31337 host. And yes, DDoS with ipv6 is not as easy. But you can easily spoof v4 SIT packets...

IPv6 uses 128 bit (16 byte) addressing.

The minimum allocation is still 1 address of course.
The minimum network allocation is a /64. that's 2^64 addresses, or 281474976710656 class B address blocks. In theory, no ISP should ever have less, but clearly there's a market segment that has been ignored - ISP customers, and it will be serviced. I'm guessing that most home networks will get a /96 (4 billion address) but that's just a guess. Every ISP is probably going to do it differently.

IPv6 packets have a standard for encryption, which arguably means they will be easier to encrypt than IPv4 packets, but they aren't all encrypted by default. Also, encrypted IPv6 packets can encrypt the source address, making traffic analysis more difficult. However, packets encrypted using the standard encryption are easy to identify as encrypted packets. This would make traffic analysis of encrypted traffic easier.

Although technically no one owns IPv6 address space, it's extremely unlikely that anyone will ever be asked to return address space until we are close to running out. According to the IPv6 specs., renumbering should be a simple task, and it also shouldn't be necessary. I'm not sure I believe either of those statements, but that is what is claimed. The real reason for this clause is to remind ISPs to tell their customers that they can't take their address space with them when they switch ISPs. (I do think it's reasonable to assume this could happen again if it wasn't prevented.)

Some Windows IPv6 support already exists. (I'm using it right now.) the website hs247.com/ has a lot of information, go slashdot them. ;)
FreeBSD and Linux already support IPv6. There are bugs, but then there are bugs in IPv4 too.

I use IPv6 with a tunnel to the 6bone. My web and email servers, as well as others, are at this moment IPv6 ready. Here is a very good site for IPv6 information: hs247.com.