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IPv6-Only Is Becoming Viable
An anonymous reader writes "With the success of world
IPv6 day in 2011, there is a lot of speculation
about IPv6 in 2012. But simply turning on IPv6 does not
make the problems of IPv4
exhaustion go away. It is only when services are usable
with IPv6-only that the internet can clip the ties to the IPv4 boat
anchor. That said, FreeBSD, Windows,
and Android
are working on IPv6-only capabilities. There are multiple
accounts of IPv6-only
network
deployments. From those, we we now know that
IPv6-only is viable in mobile, where over 80% (of
a sampling of the top 200 apps) work well with
IPv6-only. Mobile especially needs IPv6, since their are only
4 billion IPv4 address and approaching 50
billion mobile devices in the next 8 years. Ironically,
the Android test data shows that the apps most likely to fail are
peer-to-peer, like Skype.
Traversing NAT and relying on broken IPv4 is built into their method
of operating. P2P communications was supposed to be one of the
key improvements in IPv6."
Because Ping is almost 30 years old and changing it that substantially would break functionality in a huge number of OSes. Not to mention the fact that as long as IPv4 is in common use it's going to be damn confusing figuring out when it's safe to use ping in IPv4 versus IPv6.
You have things totally backwards. The operating system figures out whether a host should be reached via ipv6 vs ipv4 based on your systems IPv6 connectivity and DNS. You can't know it in advance.
If I browse to www.slashdot.org and it has an AAAA record and my computer has IPv6 I get to slashdot via IPv6. Having ping being the only utility left on the fricking operating system that does not work this way is more broken than any nastalga.
Traceroute is 30 years old too and it works just fine with both protocols enabled at the same time.
Total nonsense. traceroute