Obama Highlights IPv6 Issue

alphadogg writes "The Obama Administration bills itself as the most tech-savvy political team ever, but until now it has ignored one of the biggest issues facing the Internet: the rapid depletion of IPv4 Internet addresses and the imminent need for carriers and content providers to adopt IPv6. Today, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) will host a workshop on IPv6 that features high-profile executives from government, industry and Internet policymaking organizations. Some observers are hoping the Obama Administration will use the workshop to issue a deadline for all federal agencies to support IPv6 on their public-facing Web sites."

Comments

Re:Deadline

[pete-classic]

I would argue that Jackson comes close. I think it's shameful that he's on the US $20.

-Peter

If it had been first...

[Junta]

It seems mostly ok as a protocol if you ignore the context of being in an IPv4 world.

That said, with the IPv4 world, what problems are glaringly obvious. One is that generally, the v6 people threw out a whole lot of babies with the bathwater when they went clean slate. Also, generally, those are coming back in. In the beginning they said 'DHCP is obsolete, mDNS and stateless addressing', now they have a DHCP that is approaching the capability of DHCPv4 almost. They still need to have an interface identifier to go with the host identifier to let the DHCPv4 people get comfortable and give them all the capability they had in DHCPv4.

The other completely botched thing was providing no way for an IPv6-only host to ever talk to an IPv4-only host. They'll say it's impractical as that is a many to fewer mapping of address space and clients cannot be uniquely identified while keeping the pure vision of peer-to-peer or nothing at all in mind. However, having IPv6 hosts that are clients and only clients getting to IPv4 only servers via designated NPT (Network Protocol Translation) gateways would have enabled a great great mass of clients to shuffle right over to IPv6 without a horrible experience. I propose that this is still quite possible if the right people drove it.

The first is a matter of general maturity, but currently things are good enough for most. The rest require adoption to really drive change. The second aspect I also don't view as unfixable, it can still be done today, if the IPv6 leaders extract their heads from their asses and compromise on 'vision' for praticality, comforted somewhat by the knowledge that IPv4 would eventually atrophy away in that scenario.