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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."
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...
The thing they're not talking about here is that to meet the mandate, the gov't networks have to be *capable* of passing IPv6, and have tested that they can. Turning IPv6 back off as soon as they confirm that test is totally within the bounds of compliance (and many agencies are doing exactly that).
In short, don't expect this to actually drive IPv6 adoption...this was a paperwork exercise.
Being that IPv6 has been around for over a decade, meaning most legacy hardware has been replaced by then that used IPv4 only as well many systems even ones older then 10 years old that support TCP/IP are often new enough to get a software patch for IPv6 and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.
I've heard this referred to as "ping and unplug" by two different network vendors that we've worked with. I don't think this will be much more than a very limited proof of concept.
6. I'm sure someone will profit.
They won't be able to profit at step 6 - they hit an infinite loop at step 5!
Update all clients to IPv6 capable systems (i.e., junk Windows)
Vista runs IPV6 by default and everyone was hoping that this would help to drive adoption. IPV6 can be installed in a few clicks on an XP machine. You harboring much of an agenda there, boss?
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.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but it is my understanding that IPv6 adresses are not a superset of IPv4 ones. That means, that absolutely no current internet site is reachable by IPv6.
...
IPv6 address should be a superset of IPv4 ones. (or example : 1.2.3.4 is IPv4, 1.2.3.4.5.6.7.8 would be IPvX. you type the former in IPvX, it gets padded to 1.2.3.4.0.0.0.0 and still works). I fail to understand why it isn't so.
Well, it would be hard to expect old software to be able to send and receive packets in a new format automatically--the packet header would at least require a longer address field, but probably other changes as well that will improve performance and flexibility. On the other hand, it should be possible for programs that use the new version of the networking API to communicate with machines on IPv4. And this is possible using IPv4 mapped IPv6 addresses (RFC reference).
Dr Superlove 300ml. I use my powers for awesome
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.
I'm at least partly convinced that the ability to block "unauthorized" services using the fact that it's such a pain to run any kind of server from a machine behind a NAT router is one of the main reasons that the commercial internet industry has stuck with IPv4. If they moved to IPv6, their old "We can't give each of your computers a real IP address because we don't have enough to go around" excuse would fall apart and they would have to either start letting people run their own servers or they'd have to move to doing actual port blocking, which would look really bad.
In addition to the extensions, the following benefits are also present:
Only a few of these points mention addressing at all, and none refer to the specific length of IPv6 addresses.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)