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Feds Say They're Ready For Monday's IPv6 Deadline

Posted by Soulskill on from the upgrades dept.

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."

9 of 120 comments (clear)

  1. IPV6 here we come... by antirelic · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Or not. While the federal government of the USA may have backbones capable of running IPV6, they seriously lack the ability to effectively make the switch without a great amount of pressure. Lets face it, with NAT and other technologies, the need to migrate to a new standard has been severely reduced. Not saying that it is not needed, I am sure the "rest of the world" outside of the US and the EU would like some IP space all of their own, but market forces have already relegated that individuals have no need for unique IP space and NAT is good enough for the unwashed masses.

    Having had a little bit of experience working with big networks based on IPV4, the migration to IPV6 is going to be pretty awesome... like the titanic sinking, or an entire city being leveled by an earth quake.

    --
    20th century Marxism is not progress...
    1. Re:IPV6 here we come... by Cheeze · · Score: 5, Insightful

      You go through several NAT devices because that is what your government wants. With IPV6, you would go through the same networks, you would just have a longer NAT ip address.

      IPV6 will not make the routing table that IPV4 enforces go away, it will just give it the ability to have QOS and a few other features. If your government wants to limit your access, they will still have that ability.

      --
      Why read the article when I can just make up a snap judgement?
    2. Re:IPV6 here we come... by Just+Some+Guy · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Lets face it, with NAT and other technologies, the need to migrate to a new standard has been severely reduced.

      Not even close. NAT breaks networks horribly by its very nature, and voids the original Internet ideal of a collection of peers. Consider that with NAT it's impossible to connect to another machine which is also behind NAT without going through a third party. While governments might love the idea of forcing you to funnel traffic through a central, easily-tappable server, it sucks for end users. Not only is it bad for privacy, but for reliability: now you can't talk to your friend's machine if the helper server is down or out of bandwidth. That's not acceptable!

      Having had a little bit of experience working with big networks based on IPV4, the migration to IPV6 is going to be pretty awesome... like the titanic sinking, or an entire city being leveled by an earth quake.

      Having apparently a bit more, I don't think it's going to be that bad. You don't have to start with a complete cutover, or even make a complete transition at all. Right now, today, odds are that you could start using link local addresses on your LAN for testing. You can get an IPv6 allocation and start with little things: configure your mailserver to use it and start publishing DNS to it. Once you're convinced it's up, try again with your webserver. Maybe configure a couple of workstations for the geeks in your company and let them bang away at it. If any of that fails, no big deal! You're still live with IPv4.

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      Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
    3. Re:IPV6 here we come... by Just+Some+Guy · · Score: 2, Insightful

      The early internet consisted of a bunch of mainframes operated by a bunch of BOFH (Bastard Operators From Hell). The only guys (usually male) allowed to log on were military types or civilian employees of defense contractors, who had a whack of security clearances.

      For liking to pretend that you were there when it all started, you don't seem to understand what a peer is.

      ARPANET and the Internet were built around the idea that computers could talk to each other. NAT breaks that. QED, NAT is not what the Internet was meant to be like.

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      Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
  2. Not to supprised. by jellomizer · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Being that IPv6 has been around for over a decade, meaning most legacy hardware has been replaced by then that used IPv4 only as well many systems even ones older then 10 years old that support TCP/IP are often new enough to get a software patch for IPv6 and what is left are so old and legacy that they are not available on the internet or you can just put a Linux box on them before the network and connect via IPv6 it does an IPv4 direct communication to the system and passed the data threw.
    However most systems that cannot support IPv6 probably needed to be upgraded anyways and offered federal IT employees a law to point to get funding for a much needed upgrade.

    --
    If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
  3. Classic 5-step by kamochan · · Score: 2, Insightful

    This is good news. The IPv6 transition must happen in stages, the whole world cannot convert at the same time. In order to beat the chicken-and-egg problem, someone simply has to go first.

    1. Deploy IPv6-capable infrastructure to area X (which has now provably happened for a good part of US)
    2. Update all clients to IPv6 capable systems (i.e., junk Windows)
    3. Notice that you can't access any services, since the services do not support IPv6
    4. Bitch at Google, and install intermediate IPv6-IPv4 gateways
    5. X = X+1, goto 1
    6. I'm sure someone will profit.
  4. FUD! by Adeptus_Luminati · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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!

    003/8 General Electric Company
    004/8 Level 3 Communications, Inc.
    006/8 Army Information Systems Center
    008/8 Level 3 Communications, Inc.
    009/8 IBM
    011/8 DoD Intel Information Systems
    012/8 AT&T Bell Laboratories
    013/8 Xerox Corporation
    015/8 Hewlett-Packard Company
    016/8 Digital Equipment Corporation
    017/8 Apple Computer Inc.
    018/8 MIT
    019/8 Ford Motor Company
    020/8 Computer Sciences Corporation
    021/8 DDN-RVN
    022/8 Defense Information Systems Agency
    025/8 UK Ministry of Defence
    026/8 Defense Information Systems Agency
    028/8 DSI-North
    029/8 Defense Information Systems Agency
    030/8 Defense Information Systems Agency
    032/8 AT&T Global Network Services
    033/8 DLA Systems Automation Center
    034/8 Halliburton Company
    035/8 MERIT Computer Network
    038/8 Performance Systems International
    040/8 Eli Lily & Company
    043/8 Japan Inet
    044/8 Amateur Radio Digital Communications
    045/8 Interop Show Network
    047/8 Bell-Northern Research
    048/8 Prudential Securities Inc.
    051/8 Deparment of Social Security of UK
    052/8 E.I. duPont de Nemours and Co., Inc.
    053/8 Cap Debis CCS
    054/8 Merck and Co., Inc.
    055/8 DoD Network Information Center
    056/8 US Postal Service
    057/8 SITA

    Adeptus

    --
    No trees were killed in the making of this post; however, many trillions of electrons were horribly inconvenienced.
  5. Re:One huge caveat by hal9000(jr) · · Score: 4, Insightful

    It's more than that. It mandates a first step toward IPv6 conversion. The mandate also stated that dual stack (running Ipv4 along with IPv6) was OK too. The fundamental problem is that all the other network devices that run only IPv4 still have to supported.

    This is fundamentally no different than when companies had to run IP and IPX on computers during Novells transition in the 90's.

  6. This has all the earmarks of being as successful.. by Guppy06 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    ... as the federal government's push to go all-metric.

    "Can" pass IPv6 isn't the same as "will."