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How Feds are Dropping the Ball on IPv6
BobB-NW writes "U.S. federal agencies have six months to meet a deadline to support IPv6, an upgrade to the Internet's main communications protocol known as IPv4. But most agencies are not grabbing hold of the new technology and running with it, industry observers say. Instead, most federal CIOs are doing the bare minimum required by law to meet the IPv6 mandate, and they aren't planning to use the new network protocol for the foreseeable future."
I don't blame anyone, even government in this case, for avoiding the hassle of getting everything converted to IPv6. Maybe eventually we all will have to be there, but there always seems to be workarounds that work for everyone, minimal hassle, minimal pain.
If you wanted a Starbucks coffee, and it was one street down, and someone told you you had to go through the in-between building, climb up and down its twenty flights of stairs just to get to the next street for you coffee, and you knew you could just walk around the building on the sidewalk, what would you do? Now, if the building were only two stories high, and the block to walk around were 600 ft each side, it might be a different choice.
An interesting aside, meeting the mandate only requires they are IPv6 capable, not running it. This is the same height bar the government set for Microsoft in the early nineties when Microsoft delivered the DOA POSIX-compliant (never to be really used) NT. NT, with its barely implemented POSIX subsystem (only implemented the library portion, btw, not the user interface) got to put a check in the POSIX checkbox for government contracts.
Lesson to be learned? If you want to make an effective mandate, make it a mandate for implementation, not capability.
The government:
What benefit does your average government agency get for switching to IPv6, and does it outweigh the costs?
Obviously not, because if the benefits outweighed the costs, no mandate would be necessary. Agencies would have long ago switched on their own.
And since costs outweigh the benefits, who can blame agencies for doing the bare minimum to achieve compliance? The writeup makes it sound like agency obstinance, but I view it is good budget stewardship. Agencies don't seem to want to flush good budget down the IPv6 toilet.
They don't grade fathers, but if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up. --Chris Rock
During this last college semester I expressed my disappointment that IPv6 wasn't being implemented as widely as I thought it should be. I also subtly hinted at my disappoint that IPv6 wasn't covered at all (except one half a page of 405). My teacher said "I think it will take a new generation of Network Tech to implement IPv6". How in the hell are we going to have a new generation implementing it when it isn't even taught? I just took that joke of a Network+ test and now I'm certified, and I don't know diddly-squat about IPv6. Thankfully Wikipedia is there to explain a little bit of it to me.
"Where have all the good people gone?" - Jack Johnson
Oh, NAT is more useful in several ways. It provides a single router or entry point that you can monitor for security reasons, it prevents people from running announced services such as HTTP, SMTP, or file sharing from their internal machines, and it draws a useful curtain of obscurity against activities you don't want traced back to their source.
Switching to IPv6 often involves hardware switchovers and the elimination of old services that simply cannot interoperate with it because they weren't designed to, and should have been discarded years ago but haven't been, and the original author has very much moved on.
How do you propose to get Class B hoarders (to say nothing of Class A hoarders who got their blocks in the 80s and early 90s) to turn loose of them? Other threads have talked about lawsuits being necessary. What do you know that they don't?
In any case, there is no incentive for government, business or anyone else to adopt IPv6 unless and until it costs them to get IPv4 addresses. ARIN and the other RIRs need to announce *now* that by, say, 2009, they will start charging for IPv4 address allocations. Then you'll see IPv6 take off. If the RIRs don't start charging, then in 2010 or thereabouts they will run out of space and IPv4 users will have to go to those address hoarders who most definitely will charge them. And the result will be a LOT more chaotic for the Internet.
Fizz
- A large number of sites still don't have IPv6 DNS addresses
That's the biggest problem. Until I can reach every server with IPv6, I'll still need IPv4. Since I need IPv4, why should I bother with IPv6?
Don't piss off The Angry Economist