Windows 7 May Finally Get IPv6 Deployed

Esther Schindler writes "According to this article at IT Expert Voice, Windows 7 and IPv6: Useful at Last?, we've had so many predictions that this will be 'the year of IPv6' that most of us have stopped listening. But the network protocol may have new life breathed into it because IPv6 is a requirement for DirectAccess. DirectAccess, a feature in Windows 7, makes remote access a lot easier — and it doesn't require a VPN. (Lisa Vaas interviews security experts and network admins to find out what they think of that idea.) The two articles examine the advantages and disadvantages of DirectAccess, with particular attention to the possibility that Microsoft's sponsorship may give IPv6 the deployment push it has lacked."

Comments

Re:IPv6 addresses are overly complex

[kennedy]

Uhh... 3 letters for you. D.N.S.

Re:IPv6 addresses are overly complex

[johnw]

Why type either? You should look at getting DNS up and running on your systems. It's a bit cutting edge, but well worth it.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't need NAT to run a firewall that has the same security functionality as NAT

Re:IPv6 addresses are overly complex

[sunderland56]

Yeah, typing in IP addresses is a pain in those situations. Maybe in future Microsoft will add a "cut" and "paste" feature to Windows 7, like they have in OSX - that should make life easier.

Re:Why?

[0racle]

IP6 (and DirectAccess) in no way require you to remove a firewall between you and the rest of the universe. NAT however, can go away.

Re:IPv6 addresses are overly complex

[Chris Mattern]

Off-offtopic, but I'd much rather you typed in example.com. Don't refer to what might be a real URL as an example when you've got a name reserved by RFP for that purpose.

Re:IPv6 addresses are overly complex

[OnlineAlias]

It is a very tough feature to code however, just ask the guys who failed to add it to the iphone for several years...

Article is so full of inaccuracies...

[A beautiful mind]

...that I barely know where to begin.

IPv6 has been "the next generation of TCP/IP protocols" for so long that you can be forgiven for thinking that it will never be useful.

IPv6 is very useful the same way electricity in a socket is useful. The two things both provide basic infrastructure for running more sexy, feature-laden things that consumers actually want.

Both the Internet and the vast majority of American and European business users elected to stay with the legacy IPv4 network.

Users didn't opt for opting out of IPv6. Large telcos didn't spend enough money soon enough to get the upgrade rolling in a tragedy of the commons kind of situation.

To get around the much-predicted Internet IPv4 address famine, people turned to network address translation (NAT) and Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP). With this combination, thousands of corporate PCs can have their own internal IPv4 addresses while using up only a single IP address, as far as the Internet is concerned.

Apart from leaving CIDR out of the picture, the second sentence is simply not true. The upper limit of usability is around 30-50 computers / public ip these days, if those computers are using the internet. NAT breaks so many things...

By the time Windows XP and Windows 2003 rolled out, IPv6 was built into the operating systems.

This sentence might give you the impression that you can run IPv6 with Windows XP. That's not the case, it misses DNS resolution through IPv6 and DHCPv6, so while it supports some things, the IPv6 support is far from complete.

Windows 7, when used with Server 2008 R2, may finally give enterprise network administrators a reason to deploy IPv6.

No, when the technical people at large telcos are given the money and mandate to deploy IPv6 that's when it'll happen. When the head honchos who held back the upgrade for financial reasons and the lack of government regulation in a classic example of the tragedy of the commons realise that IPv4 blocks will be gone by 2011 fall from the IANA pool and a year later from the regional registries, they'll panic and start throwing money, excuses and horrible stopgap solutions at the problem, which could have been avoided to head for this bloody showdown we're going to see in the next couple of years as everyone will a. try to grab as many addresses as possible to keep telco projects in the pipeline from sinking b. franctically scramble to upgrade.