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Linux Foundation Says All Major Distros Are IPv6 Compliant

Posted by Soulskill on from the getting-things-done dept.

ruphus13 points out news from the Linux Foundation, which announced that all major Linux distributions meet certification requirements for the US Department of Defense's IPv6 mandates. The announcement credits work done by the IPv6 Workgroup, whose members include IBM, HP, Nokia-Siemens, Novell and Red Hat. Quoting: "Linux has had relatively robust IPv6 support since 2005, but further work was needed for the open source platform to achieve full compliance with DoD standards. The Linux Foundation's IPv6 workgroup analyzed the DoD certification requirements and identified key areas where Linux's IPv6 stack needed adjustments in order to guarantee compliance. They collaboratively filled in the gaps and have succeeded in bringing the shared technology into alignment with the DoD's standards."

14 of 241 comments (clear)

  1. so i see talk of ipv6 more and more.... by wjh31 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    is it something i as an end user of some linux distro or other ipv6 supporting OS can make use of, some option i can toggle in some options somewhere to improve something, or is it all just something in the backbone for admins and people with servers to worry about? i want to know what ipv6 means to your average jo

    1. Re:so i see talk of ipv6 more and more.... by Dolda2000 · · Score: 5, Interesting

      I, too, am using 6to4 at home in order to get rid of NAT, but lately I've been having great trouble when traveling around with my IPv6-enabled laptop (running Debian).

      See, whenever I get to a public access point (which uses public IPv4 addresses, rather than a private 192.168.x.x net) it turns out that any Vista computers connected to the same link auto-configure themselves to use 6to4 and then advertise over ICMP that they are willing to route traffic through their 6to4 net. However, it turns out that they just drop the traffic! My laptop, not knowing that, though, will try to route IPv6 traffic through them nevertheless, which just makes every IPv6 site (including my own) stop working. Viva Vista!

      Does anyone know why Vista does this, and whether it's possible to prevent or work around it somehow?

    2. Re:so i see talk of ipv6 more and more.... by WillKemp · · Score: 1, Interesting

      The advantage is you get rid of your NAT.

      That's a disadvantage for 99% of internet users. NAT blocks direct access to your computer from the internet - which is a very good thing in most cases. Only a small proportion of geeks are likely to know what to do with direct access, or care about it - and most of them can get public IP addresses now, if they want them, anyway.

      The hideous mess of viruses and spambots that comprises the vast majority of internet connected computers can surely only get much worse if anyone can get direct access to them. Yeah, i know a firewall will make it more secure, but antiviruses should have prevented the mess we've got today!

    3. Re:so i see talk of ipv6 more and more.... by kasperd · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Vista computers connected to the same link auto-configure themselves to use 6to4 and then advertise over ICMP that they are willing to route traffic through their 6to4 net. However, it turns out that they just drop the traffic!

      That is an interesting case. I wish I could point out what you should be doing differently, but it isn't obvious to me. When you have a public IPv4 address, you could run your own 6to4 gateway. But of course if you have a network with public IPv4 addresses to multiple machines, you usually don't want each and every one of them to run a 6to4 gateway. It would be more appropriate to have one machine being the 6to4 gateway, and your machine seems to be trying to find it, and fail at that.

      So that leaves us with two questions. Why are those Vista machines behaving the way they do? And what can you do to make your own laptop work under those circumstances? You could get your laptop to ignore advertisements of 6to4 routers if it already has a public IPv4 address, and then just setup your own 6to4 gateway in that case (but don't announce it on the network unless you intend to forward packets in both directions). Doing that should work as long as the network you are on does not filter away the 6to4 packets. Possibly that is what is going wrong for the Vista machines. It is plausible that they are actually working correctly, and the network is at fault. It would be worth setting up your own 6to4 gateway just to find out if that is the reason.

      The other question to ask is when there is a bunch of gateways all announcing an 6to4 segment, how do you find out if there is one among them, that works correctly. I don't have any better suggestion than just trying to send a handcomputerful of pings through each of them to servers known to respond.

      What do you do when all you are provided by the network is an RFC1918 address? Are you using a tunnel broker? Perhaps you could have a white list of good 6to4 gateways and if you receive announcements from any 6to4 gateway not on your list, just pretend it does not exist, and do whatever you would do in that case.

      --

      Do you care about the security of your wireless mouse?
  2. Re:Let's not forget by mwoliver · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Yup. In fact, back in the day, the IPv6 support in FreeBSD was the determining factor in my choice to run FreeBSD rather than any then-current distribution of GNU/Linux. Being focused on networking, I didn't have a dog in the OS race, I just needed IPv6 support, and FreeBSD won hands-down. I have enjoyed the blessings of FreeBSD ever since. Even so many years later, IPv6 support on my DD-WRT (Linux) access point is quite non-intuitive and hackish.

    Big shout-out to the fine KAME team, especially the late Itojun.

    --
    Mike O, KT2T
  3. IPv6 has been known to be needed since 1991 by apathy+maybe · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Kapor is in his element now, fluent, thoroughly in command in his material. "You go tell a hardware Internet hacker that everyone should have a node on the Net," he says, "and the first thing they're going to say is, 'IP doesn't scale!'" ("IP" is the interface protocol for the Internet. As it currently exists, the IP software is simply not capable of indefinite expansion; it will run out of usable addresses, it will saturate.) "The answer," Kapor says, "is: evolve the protocol! Get the smart people together and figure out what to do. Do we add ID? Do we add new protocol? Don't just say, we can't do it."

    Source: http://www.mit.edu/hacker/part4.html

    So why the fuck hasn't it been adopted yet?

    ------

    Anyway, does anyone have any sources as to know the other "big" OS's (MS Windows, Mac OS, the BSD's etc.) were able to speak IPv6 (if they are able to at all?)?

    Also, I've tried to find information about whether FreeDOS can do IPv6, but couldn't. Could anyone help there?

    -----

    Finally, the beauty of FLOSS.

    --
    I wank in the shower.
    1. Re:IPv6 has been known to be needed since 1991 by TheRaven64 · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Anyway, does anyone have any sources as to know the other "big" OS's (MS Windows, Mac OS, the BSD's etc.) were able to speak IPv6 (if they are able to at all?)?

      The KAME stack was completed in March 2006. It implements IPv6 and IPsec and is used by FreeBSD, BSD/OS, OpenBSD, NetBSD,DragonFlyBSD, and OS X. Linux achieved a comparable degree of support around a year later. KAME snapshots were incorporated in these operating systems before the project was completed, and enough of the protocol to be useful has been supported by them since around 2000. Linux does not use KAME, but I don't know how much (if any) code they borrow from it.

      Itojun did some really amazing work with KAME. It's sad that he didn't live to see worldwide IPv6 deployment.

      --
      I am TheRaven on Soylent News
  4. How about a report on ISPs? by Midnight+Thunder · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Now that I know Linux joins the ranks of IPv6 compliant OSs, I just need an ISP that supports IPv6. The problem is, in North America at least, is that there are still few to no ISPs providing IPv6 addresses. Instead I have to resort to tunnel providers (some listed here). What we need is a list of major internet service providers in North America and an indication of their IPv6 readiness and what they excuse is for not starting the migration.

    In order to get ISPs moving we could each mail the one we use and ask them when the plan to offer IPv6 addresses.

    Some 'cool stuff' using IPv6: https://www.sixxs.net/misc/coolstuff/

    --
    Jumpstart the tartan drive.
  5. Re:You'll see IPv6 . . . by treuf · · Score: 4, Interesting

    A major French ISP - Free (second largest ISP after Orange) - is offering IPv6 to anyone asking for it (it's an option in their control pannel, disabled by default).
    It would be interesting to see how much peoples activated that option :)

    Another smaller one here have been offering IPv6 since ages (can't remember its name though)

    A major mass-hosting facility - OVH (doing buiness in France and doing massive deployment currently in europe) is providing IPv6 to all its servers (hosted or housed).

    They are both new-commers (compared to the country operator / old hosting facilities) - which may explain such massive deployment (they have only new hardware everywhere)

  6. Re:You'll see IPv6 . . . by Tony+Hoyle · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Everything that is worth buying has been IPv6 compliant for years.

    Hmm..

    iphone - nope.
    xbox 360 - nope.
    PS3 - nope.

    That's 3 things worth buying that definately aren't.. and I'm not even including home routers on that list which are a glaring example of 'not ipv6 compliant'.

  7. Re:Catching up on the competition by Tony+Hoyle · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Samba works on ipv6 but I think the OSX version doesn't. Things go *really* screwy if you use an ipv6 enabled samba in a Win2003 domain, so they probably disabled it to avoid problems.

  8. Re:Embedded Linux does ipv6 too by j+h+woodyatt · · Score: 3, Interesting

    "The right way would have been to extend the address space while still obeying to the KISS principle."

    The IETF has considered so many proposals along this line that it just produces eye-rolls from the greybeards now. They don't work any better than IPv4 w/ NAPT extensions, they still don't preserve backward compatibility with IPv4, and they don't solve the problems that IPv6 does.

    If you think you're smarter than everybody who's tried to do this before, then write up an Internet Draft. What's stopping you?

    --
    jhw
  9. Re:Let's not forget by Ash-Fox · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Possibly because the Linux Foundation has a history of running press releases saying 'Linux can now do something that *BSD could do ages ago!' only without mentioning the fact that Linux is late to the party, and in some cases not mentioning the fact that the code that they are so proud of was ported to Linux from one of the BSDs.

    Is BSD even relevant anymore? - Serious question.

    Additionally, there has been IPv6 support in Linux for a very long time already, what was being said was major distributions showing compliance to a certain specification put forward by the DoD.

    --
    Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
  10. slashdot.org on ipv6? why not? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    ipv6.google.com has been running for quite a while (bouncing logo and all) and I use it as much as possible just to boost the stats on it, but really, slashdot is a perfect candidate to help boost adoption. It's pretty easy to get on ipv6 through a tunnel to someone like sixxs.net these days, especially for the likes of a slashdot reader.

    Come on already! Naysayers be damned!