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Linux Foundation Says All Major Distros Are IPv6 Compliant
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."
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
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.
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?
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)
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'.
"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