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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?)
Oh Boy! don't Mix up your IP with you GPG-Sig :)
--
Stefan
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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
There is an IPv6 capable putty client available at unfix.org.
:-)
It works well but it doesn't seem to like connecting to '4 hosts. (yet...) I renamed the IPv6 version to putty6.exe to get around that problem
Bush is on fire and its not good for my lungs.
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.
Here are some very simple notes that I scratched about getting Redhat 8 working with IPv6 over IPv4. It's really that simple.
Get your own free personal location tracker
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.
That would not be entirely true. Internet Explorer for example won't work this way. It also needs an update of the inetinfo.dll to work correctly. And if I remember correctly (this was years ago) the structures for WinSock do specific length things concerning IP addresses. The Windows 2000 IPv6 Beta patch does not only patch the winsock libraries but also all sorts of programs including inetinfo.dll.
The Trumpet Winsock IPv6 implementation (for 9x) does some kind of proxying for IPv6 which enables almost all native v4 apps to function with v6 as the resolver library automatically does the proxying towards an internal v4 address that gets translated to v6.
-- Cliff Albert
Matrix reloaded. When Trinity typed:
ssh 10.0.0.2
I realised that IPv6 is doomed.
With a name like Deep Space 6, they should really be using Cisco routers...
graspee
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.
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.
I figured IPV6 was more like Deep Space Nine, neither one's going anywhere...
If your theory is different from practice, then your theory is wrong.
Since the Winsock emulates the BSD calling interface (with some WSA_* handwaving in advance), the problem is apps using ipv4-only functions like gethostbyname, gethostbyaddr and using PF_INET. The solution is having the apps use getaddrinfo and PF_UNSPEC and let the resolver figure out itself what is best.
Using the addrinfo structures to hold resolver data breeds apps that can do both ipv4 _and_ ipv6. As far as I know, winsock groks the addrinfo stuff. People just need to use it.
FAQ contains all the info for: .Net
6Wind (SixOS)
Cisco (IOS)
FreeBSD
Juniper (JunOS)
Linux - Debian
Linux - New - using iproute2
Linux - Old
NetBSD
OpenBSD
Solaris
Windows 98 / NT4 / 2000 / XP /
As for linux, you should have taken a look in the everlasting Peter Bieringer doc at The Linux Doc Project.
http://unfix.org
Debian is assessing *ALL* of its packages for IPv6 support. This is a huge task.
See this page for details:
http://debian.fabbione.net/stat/
If you want to go right to the package status/statistics, go here:
http://debdev.fabbione.net/cgi-bin/getstats
-molo
Using your sig line to advertise for friends is lame.
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