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Feds Say They're Ready For Monday's IPv6 Deadline
netbuzz writes "By all indications and against all odds, it appears as though most, if not all, federal agencies will have met the mandate issued back in 2005 that their network backbones become capable of passing IPv6 packets by June 30, 2008. NetworkWorld quotes Pete Tseronis, chair of the IPv6 working group of the Federal CIO Council, saying, 'I have not heard of anybody who is not going to make the IPv6 deadline.' Those involved are calling this a significant milestone in what has been an extensive effort to bring IPv6 into widespread deployment."
If you really believe that anything that doesn't support IPv6 at this point is "legacy" you clearly haven't tried to implement it. A few things off the top of my head:
* Cisco IOS will route IPv6, but it does doesn't do it in hardware (it forces the packet up to the totally underpowered CPU of the router), so the packet rates are pathetic compared to IPv4.
* Until fairly recently, the Cisco PIX and ASA would route IPv6, but several major features (like failover) weren't available.
* Running NAC? I have yet to talk to a NAC vendor who supports IPv6.
* Many of the Security Information Manager products don't do IPv6, either (or they didn't the last time I checked).
* Heck, let's talk Windows XP. It theoretically supports IPv6, but it will only do DNS over IPv4.
Vendor support for IPv6 has been pathetic.
Yeah, I actually work for GE, we have the entire friggin 3.x.x.x range, 16 *million* IP's, for roughly 300K real employees (and a ton of contractors) plus servers.
I mean, being realistic here, unless we have a server for every employee/contractor, and they each have 8 machines on their desk.. I'm betting we don't use more than a million of those.
And of that, virtually *none* (a handful) are actually on the public internet. 99% of them (at least) are behind firewalls and proxies, so *not* using a 10.x subnet internally is just a waste.
Sadly, 5 years and I've heard it mentioned *once*, but haven't actually seen any motion towards changing (like configuring switches for both 3.x and 10.x routing, etc). While, yes, I comprehend the scale of it, realistically a simple 3.x->10.x one-to-one mapping wouldn't be all *that* hard, and a per-site/per-business cutover.
But like most of corporate america, we talk about a lot of things, but not much really happens.
Hey IANNA, why not free up some of the "LEGACY" Class-A allocations (see below) That would free some 650 MILLION addresses!!! Some 15% of the address space.
http://www.iana.org/assignments/ipv4-address-space [iana.org].
That'll do us for what? Another 10-15 years or so? Plus if the US gov wants to release a bunch too since they are going IPv6.
This whole "OMG! We're going to run out of addresses (and ponies)" scare is starting to be more pathetic and fake than Nostradamus predictions!
Take a read of this blog post to find out what's really happening:
/8 per month in 2007, so even if they did recover all 650 million addresses from the allocations you mentioned (very unlikely), it would not buy us another 10-15 years. It would buy us about 3 years assuming the demand for IP addresses doesn't increase.
http://blog.icann.org/?p=271
They allocated more than one
Reclaiming address space doesn't solve the problem, it just delays it. And it doesn't even delay it by that much.