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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."

5 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.

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    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.

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      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?
  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.

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    If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
  3. 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.