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.'"

Comments

Deployed!?!

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

What are the Downsides to IPv6? Anyone?

[Banner]

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.

Re:What are the Downsides to IPv6? Anyone?

[gclef]

There is also right now a huge disagreement going on in the background about how to multi-home in IPv6.

The presently-proposed model implies that only big ISPs (plans for at least 200 customers that you'll be allocating space to) can get their own IP space...everyone else has to get space allocated to them from bigger groups. This, predictably, is making the content providers and big enterprises very unhappy, because they're used to (and now require) multiple uplinks to differing ISPs.

The proposed fix for this problem, shim6, has been routinely savaged as a complete non-starter. That's mostly because it's proposing allowing each and every end host to make it's own decisions about what path to take, causing all sorts of uglyness for security devices and traffic engineering.

There presently is no good answer to this, which is why a lot of orgs are holding off on IPv6.

Re:What are the Downsides to IPv6? Anyone?

[jd]

In IPv6, the MAC address is kept in the ethernet frame but also in the low 48 bits of the IP address. Thus, routers do not need to have an ARP lookup table to get the MAC address - they can simply copy-and-paste from the IP address in the packet (for the final step) or the IP address of the next router in the path (for all other steps).

This means the number of tables for lookups is reduced by 1 and there is no need to do reverse lookups (so there is no latency in such activity). It is also central to the way IPv6 handles mobility, as it means (a) you're guaranteed there is an IP address available for you in the network you join, (b) the host part of the IP address will remain the same, only the network component will change, and (c) because only the network component changes, routers will be capable of re-routing traffic upstream to the new destination with zero packet loss.

(Most mobile IP uses forwarders, but IPv6 was designed from the start to have mobility within the protocol as far as possible and not as a hack.)

Re:The first

[cayenne8]

"Now if only someone would slap around ComCast and get them using IPv6 natively.. or all USA ISPs for that matter.."

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.

Remember GOSIP?

[KenSeymour]

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."

Re:IPv6 Adoption

[kbnielsen]

> 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.

By biggest question on if this is ready is..

[kesuki]

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.