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Deep Space 6 Publishes New IPv6 Status Pages
Mauro Tortonesi writes "The Deep Space 6 initiative publishes the first of the new IPv6 Status Pages: Current Status of IPv6 Support for Networking Applications.
The IPv6 Status Pages are a survey of the current status of IPv6 support for the Linux networking stack, system libraries and networking applications.
At the moment there is only one page concerning the IPv6 support of Linux networking applications, but we are planning to publish more pages soon and to extend our target to other important UNIX-derived OSes (e.g. *BSD) too."
Apache 1.3 & Opera are the only ones listed that do not cuurently support IPV6 adequately. So what?!? This will be an issue when, 2010???? IPV6 is still far from wide spread implementation. When the time comes Opera will be updated with the necessary support. As for Apache. Well, hopefully by 2010 everyone will have stepped up to 2.x or maybe even 3.x.
It is possible to roll out IPV6 right now, the infrastructure and applications are all "capable". But it will require a great deal of effort and there is NO motivating factor, right now, to make everyone put forth the effort.
When the time comes that everyone HAS to implement IPV6 for some reason, they will. For now, the reason still isn't there and almost no one will.
IPV6 isn't catching on because it will require a lot of work for EVERYONE to reconfigure EVERY machine on the netwaork. Right now there is NO driving reason to force this and no one wants to do it. Contrary to the myth that has been spouted for years now about the lack of IPV4 addresses, there is no shortage of IPV4 addresses right now. NAT and proxies have made it such that there are plenty of IP4 addresses to go around. At least for now.
At least not until ISPs stop being jackasses.
My ISP used to offer all the addresses one could grab, so I just used my cable modem as a DHCP server for my lan like an idiot. The end result was that transfering a file from one computer to another went along at a slow crawl.
Companies can charge outrageous fees for more addresses. Now that they've stuck me to one, it would cost $150 to get two of the things.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
No matter what you'd like to believe, the USA is not a "facist" country. Unlike places like China, there is no national filtering. There is no such things as "save the children" or "protect software jobs from piracy." Look up the definition of a fascist country and think again.
This is the problem being an early adopter. The mainstream won't see the point of throwing many resources at IPv6 until they are using it. You most likely won't have good support for IPv6 until a few years after the mainstream really starts to adopt it. Do any ISPs for home users even support IPv6 in any way? Do many businesses use IPv6 at all? Until the answer is yes, most developers / system administrators / & etc won't care much about IPv6.
Writing programs which use IPv6 is good, but don't expect it to be easy at this early time. I suggest writing in workarounds for the more advanced features of IPv6 until they are fully supported. It is fine to add a compile (or run-time) option to use the real feature, but until systems have adopted IPv6 and worked out all the bugs, you'll need to use basic functionality and hacks around the poor support. Otherwise whole segments of the population won't be able to use your programs with IPv6 at all. It sucks, but is what one has to tolerate with new things.
Just keep going. Once it becomes popular, support will be better, and people will thank early adopters like you.
I am working in the network (Siegmund, why did I just type "notwork"? Any other psychologist here who can enlighten me on this?) department of a company, which very much relies on its international network. And I would be very happy, if I could advise my CIO to make an IPv6-Rollout on our network. But I can't.
This list is showing us, that there are a lot of open source applications already supporting IPv6. Fine, that means I can do test installations in a lab. But in normal business there will be many years until I can do anything in IPv6.
The reasons are simple: There are about 17,000 PCs in our network, and they all run windows. Though some newer versions of this OS support IPv6, they do not support the features that would be needed, like end to end encryption (the NULL-encryption built into the stack does not get me anywhere).
In addition to this most applications do not support it at all. First thing I can think of is our main business application, running on AS/400. I guess the developers of this did not hear of v6 at all. And then there are all the hardware devices, currently being addressed by v4: Airline Ticket Printers, Barcodescanners, Networkprinters, securitysystems at our doors, switches, CPE-Routers etc.
Currently this list shows us what we knew beforehand: IPv6 is a nice playground for nerds. And nerds should play with it, if they do not expect to retire within the next 15years. But today it is far from being usable in normal business. There are only very few companies, the smaller the better, which have sufficiently controllable environment to be able to roll it out.
What we would need today, to be able to roll it out in the near future (within the next 5 to 10 years) is a decision from our managements. The decision has to be not to make any investments in new hard- or software unless it is capable of IPv6. With that decision we could starve out all the v4-only devices over a period of time. But nobody makes the decision currently, again for good reasons: The v4-Stuff works. Additionally there are many cheap devices available on the market and they do not support v6. Pay 3 times the money for a printer, only to have support for a technology like v6? I mean get real, it is very unsure that it will be in mass market within the next 10 years. High risk of investing into something completely useless here.
So we have a simple problem here: Nobody builds v6 technology (at least nobody with commercial interests in it) because nobody buys it. Nobody buys it, because it is not produced in large numbers. (nobody that is with some exceptions, but I'm talking real mass market devices, and these are not Cisco-Routers or something. Compare the number of printer sold to the number of routers sold, to get my point).
Nils
imho it was extremely stupid to not embed the ipv4 into the ipv6 address space.
the way ipv6 was designed it requires _simultaneous_ upgrades on both ends, which is very unlikely to happen.
if ipv4 was simply part of the ipv6 address space and namespace, one could use an ipv6 client to connect to "legacy" (non-ipv6) hosts, without all the quirkiness and error-proneness of bolted-on ipv4.
what's now happening is that servers are supposed to get upgraded first. guess what, it doesnt happen. now if microsoft made ipv6 the default protocol in their next OS release and their users could *still* connect to all ipv4 servers that would be an entirely different story!
--florian