One Less Reason to Adopt IPv6?

alphadogg writes "For a decade, IPv6 proponents have pushed this upgrade to the Internet's main communications protocol because of its three primary benefits: a gargantuan address space, end-to-end security, and easier network administration through automatic device configuration. Now it turns out that one of these IPv6 benefits — autoconfiguration — may not be such a boon for corporate network managers. A growing number of IPv6 experts say that corporations probably will skip autoconfiguration and instead stick with DHCP, which has been updated to support IPv6."

Comments

Re:DHCP in an IPV6 world

[markom]

DHCP doesn't give a network admin any more control over a network, either. That's just a silly statement. How does having a server doling out IP addresses make it any easier to control a network? It's not a like a device *must* be set to use DHCP. It's not difficult to figure out what IP address ranges a DHCP server is not doling out and use that, even on IPV4. I beg to differ.

DHCP combined with modern network infrastructure allows network administrators complete control over all addressing issues in the network - including preventing non-DHCP hosts from participating in the network (called DHCP snooping) and location-based services ("DHCP option 82"). DHCP is so much more than just a kludge to get an IP address to the host. Scalability of DHCP allows network administrators to append information such as DNS, NTP, TFTP (for IP Telephony/TV) server information and so much more - default gateway, static routes just to name few. All this is pretty much lacking from IPv6 autoconfiguration.

That's why we tend to like DHCP ;-)

Marko
CCIE #18427

Re:DHCP in an IPV6 world

[asuffield]

The important point to remember, though is *2 YEARS*. That's how long we have until the IPv4 address space is fully allocated at the top level. It may take a little longer (months?) before people start really feeling any pain from that at the end-user level. But its the critically important point for people to realize. Can you be ready for IPv6 in 2 years? You need to be. If its gonna take you 2 years to get IPv6 functioning in your network, then you need to start *NOW*.

About once a year I investigate the current state of ipv6 support, and every time so far I have found every major operating system (including linux-based ones) to be inadequate to the task of deploying ipv6. The software support is just not there, on both the system and application levels. Sure, I can configure ipv6 interfaces on hosts and even have some of them set up tunnels and talk to each other, but it is entirely impossible for me to configure a non-trivial network without ipv4 support on every host and still expect it to work, so there's no damned point.

NAT is the solution to the address space problem. Get used to it, because ipv6 has spent the last five years failing to become a solution. When we finally run out of ipv4 addresses, we aren't going to switch to ipv6, we're going to switch to using NAT at the ISPs. You won't get an internet-routeable address for anything other than a server, after that happens - regular DSL lines will be allocated an address from one of the private ranges and NATted onto a smaller pool of routeable addresses as they leave the ISPs network.

It's going to come down to a choice between a technology that has spent years going nowhere and a technology that has spent years being used as the solution to the problem. I know which way the ISPs are all going to jump.