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

Missing DNS

[thegameiam]

IPv6 Autoconfiguration is close but no cigar in a couple of signignificant ways:

1) DNS server information wasn't baked in from the beginning (there are now some drafts to fix this, but I haven't yet seen the working code) - all this time, and we managed to recreate BootP...

2) Because autoconfiguration uses /64 addresses for hosts, the address size gain, while large, isn't anywhere near the original promise, and encoding the MAC address into a globally-visable IP address does release information about hosts which was formerly private (NIC vendor, for one, as well as the more theoretical complaint about the layering violation).

3) Just try it with VMWare or other virtualization software. Ouch. There's a whole lot of borked there.

4) Obviously you wouldn't want to use it for a true server, becuase who wants their server IP to change when a NIC burns out?

All that said, in a dual-stack environment it works reasonably well: but it doesn't honestly look like anyone gave much thought to a time when IPv4 wouldn't be present on the LAN or on the hosts...

Re:DHCP in an IPV6 world

[igjeff]

DHCP does a whole lot more than that.

The reality of the situation is that stateless autoconfig in IPv6 is one way to get basic networking connectivity setup, DHCP is another. Depending on your situation, the phase of the moon, and any of a number of philosophical viewpoints held by the network admin, stateless autoconfig might or might not get used. *shrug* Even with stateless autoconfig, DHCPv6 might also get used to configure other information that is not handled by stateless autoconfig (DNS servers, NTP servers, any of a huge list of other things).

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*.

Why Not Both

[maz2331]

Autoconfig is a nice default for something that "just works" without much need for an admin to plan out the network, and DHCP is great for tighter control where needed. What's wrong with having both options available?

Re:Whatever Works

[ajs]

Yeah sometimes cool features don't evolve into benefits. News? Not really. What's news is that we're still dragging our heels on IPv6. We dodged the bullet once by developing and widely deploying NAT and at the same time reclaiming large amounts of unused address space via switching core routing to CIDR. However, that trick only bought us a certain amount of time. As the world becomes increasingly connected, we're going to face the same problem again. Why are we waiting until it's a crisis to deal with it?

Or have I got this wrong

[Silver Sloth]

If its gonna take you 2 years to get IPv6 functioning in your network, then you need to start *NOW*. or have I got two years to configure the gateway between the corporate network and the internet? That's a much smaller task.

OK let me get this straight...

[Spy der Mann]

IPv6 isn't that good because DHCP has been updated to support IPv6?
O.O *blink blink* O.O

Re:Whatever Works

[ameline]

> Why are we waiting until it's a crisis to deal with it?

Because that's just human nature -- we're all procrastinators -- some of us admit it -- others are putting that admission off.

History is replete with situations where timely action would have saved piles of money and/or lives -- have we ever acted at the right time? No -- we wait until something like http://www.historyplace.com/worldwar2/timeline/dday.htm is necessary.

So I think we can all safely predict that it will be a crisis before we do anything about it.

And remember -- never put off until tomorrow that which can be put off until the day after. :-)

Crisis, what crisis?

[dpilot]

Because people learned the WRONG lesson from y2k.

Nothing happened.

So the accepted wisdom became that the whole thing was just an alarmist fiasco that chewed up a bunch of money unnecessarily. They don't realize that y2k was no problem precisely because of all the noise. A LOT of people did a lot of planning and a lot of work, and that all paid off in how few problems there really were.

But the common man, and unfortunately the common leaders don't understand that. So now y2k was a so-called crisis, wasn't a problem, and we can approach our next so-called crisis without the extensive preparation we "wasted" on y2k. Oh boy!

Re:DHCP in an IPV6 world

[afabbro]

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.

Son, they've been saying that for 15+ years.

Yes, there is a limit. But once IPV4 address space at the "top level" becomes scarce, it will be handled according to the rules of any scarce commodity - it'll become more expensive. That will encourage efficiency, free space from wasteful users, etc. Then we'll get close again, lather rinse repeat, etc. We will eventually hit the point of "full" but it's not like in September 2010 suddenly there will be no more routable IPs for the next system that needs one.