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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."
It's a pretty useful list for UNIX users, however I don't see any Windows program that actually is doing IPv6 (for example Putty). It would be nice to also have such a list as I personally see IPv6 Win32 applications as the real breaktrough for IPv6.
-- Cliff Albert
It's great to see that a list is being kept of the programs that are IPv6 capable... that run under Unix systems.
Any such lists for programs that run under other IPv6 operating systems? Like Windows? (yes, it has IPv6 support!)
Any other mainstream OSes have IPv6 support? (MacOS?)
at this point in time IPv6 is not useful for anything other than reverse DNS for those people that aren't allowed to have reverse DNS (cable modem dynamic, etc).
No one has ipv6 that doesn't have ipv4 servers, there are few (if any) residential networking hardware manu's that distribute IPv6 enabled devices (for good reason, ipv6 will eliminate the need for NAT).
Win2k/XP is a PAIN IN THE ASS to setup for ipv6, I didn't even bother (I use it on the Linux side for reverse DNS on IRC) but the documentation available is near nothing for XP.
Someday it might come around and be useful, as of now, no.
The same goes for all site owners here.
Get your own free personal location tracker
geez, as soon as I try to visit that website, I get return port scans from them. How nice (NOT)!
As a software programmer who has written IPv6 enabled applications what I'd really like to see is a similar report of the kernel support for IPv6 in addition to common applications, and for multiple operating systems.
For instance I took advantage of the superior multicasting capability of IPv6, but when porting to different Unixes I found varying level of support. Some just didn't do it, while others were missing some important APIs which made it easier. And some just have messed up C header files rather than faulting the kernel. IPv6 is supposed to have a whole new set of APIs which allow your application to do things like enumerate the various network adapters (important to know when multicasting). Name resolution is also done differently, and with more sane APIs.
The IETF IPv6 Working Group has been busy developing a lot of standards, and for the developer the two most important are RFC2553 for the basic sockets API, and RFC3542 for advanced sockets API. But many Unix vendors aren't up to the latest standard and still implement the older RFC's 2133 and 2292 respectively.
Oh, and on the applications side, many network administrative tools are missing from their list. What about netfilter (aka, iptables and iptables6), or tcpdump, nc, ping/ping6, or X Window? Also what about language support for those languages which have "super" libraries. Python's support for IPv6 is getting pretty strong, but I've found Java's support to be superficial (it only exposes say 10% of IPv6 functionality). Not to complain too much though, this as list is the most complete I've seen so far.