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Federal Agencies Must Use IPv6 by 2008
MoiTominator writes "The White House Office of Management and Budget announced on Wednesday that all federal agencies must deploy IPv6 by June 2008. So far, Defense is the only agency which has made any progress toward implementing the new protocol." From the article: "While we know that IPv6 technologies are deployed throughout the government we do not know specifically which ones, how many there are, or precisely where they are located...For cost, the agencies must report on estimates for planning, infrastructure acquisition, training and risk mitigation."
While IPv6 fixes many problems in IPv4, the developed world will not
embrace IPv6 until many shortcomings in the protocol are addressed.
1. Cisco routers suck at IPv6. Many of cisco's routers use the
router's CPU to process IPv6 packets instead of the fast-path. The
reasons for this are explained in the next few points. While Juniper's
routers are substantially better at IPv6 than cisco's, IT managers are
often restrained by insane corporate policy that dictactes the use of
cisco.
2. There are too many addresses. There are 16.7 million addresses per
square metre of the earth's surface, including the oceans. This is
overkill. The world does not need more than the 4 billion addresses
available with IPv4, and I challenge you to come up with an
application that requires that many. Assuming that you can actually
come up with one, it could easily be solved with Network Address
Translation, or NAT as it is commonly known.
3. IPv6 addresses are too large. An IPv6 address is 128 bits in size -
64 bits of which are reserved for addressing hosts, and 64 bits of
which are reserved for routing. One thing that is cool with IPv6 is
address autoconfiguration. Take your 56-bit MAC address on your
ethernet card, ask for 64-bits of network prefix, bang it together
with EUI-64 and you are set. The problem with a 64-bit network prefix
is that routing tables become massive. Just do the math and you'll see
that extreme amounts of memory are required to hold routing tables.
4. The IPv6 header is too large. An IPv4 header compact at 20 bytes in
length, while the IPv6 is bloated at 40 bytes. That's right people,
each one of your IP packets has twice as much overhead as before.
While this may not sound much, IP networks have a requirement that the
minimum MTU supported must be 576 bytes. That means that where you
might have got 556 bytes of data in your IP packets, you now get 536
bytes. This means that downloading stuff will take 3.4% longer.
Sure, IPv6 allows for nice hacks like those described in this article,
but is it really ready for prime time?
Which nerd lobbied hard and sucked enough cock to get that announcement?
You'd think out of all the things that are important, IPv6 would not be one of them. Good on them though. It takes one hell of a push to get people out of the mediocre and onto something better because it offers no immediate benefit to them.
You are all fucking retards. Lunix is a shit operating system, and BSD is dead. Apple is for closet homos. Get with the times, use Windows. Open Source is for losers. What other industry is so stupid as to work for free?
Not to mention things like voip.
omfg! people, get a clue!
go with IPV8 already!
sheesh... ipv6 has been dead for years!
you can try www.ipv8.org or do a google search.
I think that the only reason the White House is pushing this so hard is that Bush thought they were talking about a TV station.