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."

Comments

Embedded Linux does ipv6 too

[dattaway]

Many embedded linux devices are IPV6 compliant. Even my AXIS webcam can talk ipv6.

Unfortunately, my ISP, RoadRunner is stuck in dark ages.

Re:Embedded Linux does ipv6 too

[PolygamousRanchKid]

With the US auto industry going down the shitter, some /8s could be reassigned real soon.

Viva IPv4!

You mean, they are going to be ".gov" domains, real soon, at your expense.

Re:Embedded Linux does ipv6 too

[mqduck]

GNU is not UNIX.

Re:Embedded Linux does ipv6 too

[Gorgonzolanoid]

EMACS is a decent operating system, but it could use a better text editor.

Re:Embedded Linux does ipv6 too

[dadragon]

Water is a liquid.

I'm Canadian, you insensitive clod!

Re:Embedded Linux does ipv6 too

[ArbitraryConstant]

> What happens if NAT is used all over the place? You could imagine a bunch of
> subnets that use one address to the outside world but have hundreds or
> thousands of machines internally.

It *is* used all over the place. It's even used on an ISP-wide scale (expect that to become more common in the west). NAT delayed IP address exhaustion for a few years, a few years ago. The current rate of IP usage is what's happening *with* widespread use of NAT.

> There's a lot to be said for NAT from a security point of view too. Since you
> need to open up holes manually for incoming services, incoming connections
> for anything else will be blocked which makes it impossible for people to
> exploit most security flaws on the machines behind the router.

You can get all of that from a stateful firewall that blocks inbound connections by default.

> Reading between the lines it seems like IPv6 was a revolutionary solution to
> running out of address space. NAT was an evolutionary one. As usual the
> market has picked the evolutionary solution and more purist types are whining
> about it.

NAT isn't a solution at all, it's a way to delay the inevitable. It has successfully done that, into approximately 2011-2012. What it doesn't do is change the fundamental problem, it's not possible to use it *enough* to hold off exhaustion indefinitely.

Breaking end-to-end connectivity isn't the primary concern. This has already largely happened with NAT, and will continue to happen to a certain extent with IPv6 because we'll be using stateful firewalls. We can deal with this for most home users.

The problem is that NAT still consumes IPs, and other hosts like servers really do need to be reachable. The market prefers NAT now because exhaustion hasn't happened yet, and as the last few months have demonstrated, the market is remarkably good at ignoring problems for as long as possible.

Purist types *are* whining about it. But pragmatic types like me are also concerned that people like you seem to think NAT is something we can use later as a solution, when we've already been using it for years as a way to buy time.

Re:Embedded Linux does ipv6 too

[darthdavid]

I'm American you insensitive clod, our beer is water!

Re:Catching up on the competition

[UnknowingFool]

Well Apple and MS has had some IPv6 support for a while but they are shades to the amount of support. I believe that IPv6 has been available in Linux before MS or Apple (since 1996). However it was deemed "experimental" until 2005 even though it worked well enough for most people and distros. MS has had limited IPv6 starting with Win2K and has had some IPv6 support with XP in 2002. As for DoD compliance, only Vista with SP1 is partially compliant and OS X does not to appear to have been tested.

How about a report on ISPs?

[Midnight Thunder]

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/

Re:so i see talk of ipv6 more and more....

[Dolda2000]

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?

Re:You'll see IPv6 . . .

[treuf]

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)

Re:Catching up on the competition

[TheRaven64]

Apple didn't spend much at all. They use the KAME stack, which was developed by a consortium of Japanese companies for BSD-family systems. It was started in 1998 and achieved full compliance in 2006. Apple just pulled in the code and merged it. Since it already ran on BSD/OS, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD and DragonflyBSD, this was not a huge undertaking.

Re:IPv6 has been known to be needed since 1991

[neirboj]

Section 2.5.5.2 of RFC-4291: IP Version 6 Addressing Architecture describes what in IPv4 terms one might call a super-network prefix that does exactly that: map the existing Internet onto an infinitesimal corner of the huge IPv6 address space.