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U.S. Government to Adopt IPv6 in 2008
IO ERROR writes "The U.S. Government is set to transition to IPv6 in June 2008, according to Government Computer News: 'In the newest additions to the IPv6 Transition Guidance, the CIO Council's Architecture and Infrastructure Committee has provided a list of best practices and transition elements that agencies should use as they work to meet the deadline. The latest additions, (MS Word) released in May, are a compilation of existing recommendations and best practices gathered from the Defense Department, which has been testing and preparing for the transition for years, the private sector, and the Internet research and development community.'"
Wouldn't IPv6 basicly be deployed when 51%> adopt it? If the commercial world doesn't accept it then the goverment will be on it's own and that won't fly too well.
I haven't had the time yet to read over the specs and try to figure out what the downsides and hassles for the rest of us will be with IPv6, but I'm sure there are slashdotters out there who have taken the time to figure out where the problems and issues are.
If those of you out there who understand those issues could make a few posts here I would greatly appreciate it.
Thank you.
How about having a scheme like the following: If I have, say, the single address 111.222.333.444 (it's not a valid IP address, I know), and have more than one thing I want to plug in, I just append another dot and create a new sublevel. I get 111.222.333.444.1, 111.222.333.444.2, etc. There is no limit to it.
The downside I can think of is that it will probably be slightly more work (and thus slower) for the machines on the net that reads the address on packets to send them in the right direction (I believe they often do it in hardware). But I think it could be worth it, don't you?
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You think that's bad. This article mentions getting info to transition to it from the US DoD....and this /. article is the first time I've heard anything about the DoD pushing to transition to IPv6!!!!
Heck...we're rebuilding systems from scratch in some cases post Katrina, and yet nothing is mentioned to us about trying to do anything with IPv6.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
The good news: long term, I think IPv6 is desirable. Thus, I like seeing a large organization pave the way. Let them get the kinks out. Let them find out what all goes wrong. Let them blaze the trail so we can ride on their coattails. Let them incur the big expense.
Several others have already stepped up to the plate and have implemented IPv6. Here are some notes asked when Comcast did their presentation at NANOG about how their IPv6 migration of their cable modem pools worked.
I hope it goes more efficiently than our switch to the metric system.
I remember when the government mandated the switchover from TCP/IP to ISO protocols. The acronym for that was GOSIP.
Computer industry vendors spent serious money preparing for the August 1990 adoption deadline.
They had to implement the ISO protocols or risk not being able to sell their systems to the government (always a major customer).
The revised date for adoption is never.
The worst part about doing government contracts was dealing with all the folks that say:
"We can't design this around TCP/IP, the government is mandating ISO."
"We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them." -- Albert Einstein
> Na, it'll be when MS issues a critical update that accidentally switches your network stack to use IPv6 .... :-)
:)
Think Windows Vista
According to Microsoft, Vista will have IPv6 installed and enabled pr. default and will prefer IPv6 over IPv4. Link is here.
Which firewalls can currently be used to filter, log, and block ipv6 traffic?
IPV6 definitely has been around for many years now, but none of the windows firewalls I've downloaded seemed to have any kind of configurations for logging or filtering ipv6. Sure that's 2 years away, but unless I overlooked a firewall (there are so many for windows) or they use some kind of open source package that probabbly has ipv6 firewall capability already. i have to wonder how they're going to keep secure.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
I suspect this will be about as successful as the DOD's old policy of only doing development in Ada. Let the waiver requests begin!
The Army reading list
Given how many problems with IPv4 this new revision solves and that a thorough look was taken at the protocol in its entirety, of all things, I'm surprised *geeks* usually just try to find reasons to not like it. Sure, admins may need to retrain, and there'll be infrastructure costs, but since when did geeks stop looking at positive evolution as being bigger than these things?
There's also always a lot of FUD spread around this matter, and one can find it even in this topic, for example IPv6 increasing routing complexity. IPv6 uses hierarchical address ranges *and* is modularized so there's not just less complexity, but even less *traffic* to route unless using more advanced features of IPv6. After the transition, IPv6 is better for your routers.
NAT's also seem to be a common enough argument against IPv6 that someone should have written a damn "Why NAT's won't solve address space issues" FAQ to uninformed people already. There is something similar enough for that though.
Anyway, instead of just ranting, here's a document about some of the changes IPv6 makes. Maybe especially this part is educative to some.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!