World IPv6 Launch Day Underway

A number of readers have written in with stories related to today's permanent rollout of IPv6 by several major organizations. From the looks of it, for the 1% or so of end users with IPv6 support, everything is going smoothly. For those not so lucky to have IPv6 already, an anonymous reader writes with (mostly) good news: 60% of ISPs intend to enable IPv6 by the end of 2012. For business users, darthcamaro provides some words of caution: "...the Chief Security Officer of VeriSign doesn't think IPv6 should be turned on by a whole lot of people. The problem is network security devices in many cases don't scan IPv6. So if you turn IPv6 on, you're screwed. 'If you don't have that visibility into IPv6, you should probably consider explicitly disabling IPv6 on your systems until you can take a very concerted approach to enabling IPv6 in a secure manner,' McPherson said."

Comments

slashdot?

[pe1rxq]

So when is slashdot going to leave the dark ages?

Re:so what is ipv6 good for?

[gstoddart]

No more dealing with public/private IPs, or the whole NAT shitpile.

And yet I predict internally companies will still use public/private IPs (10.x.x.x anyone?) and use NAT. My internal private network will continue to use a NAT'ed firewall.

I predict this will mostly affect stuff outside of the firewall, not inside. Most companies will probably keep their internal network on IPv4. There's no way they're going to want all of their machines with an internet addressable location.

Oh, and while every IP belongs to only one device, there's nothing saying every device should have only one IP. You could easily assign more addresses to a single IPv6 host than the entire IPv4 internet *has*.

Which just sounds like more admin work that people won't want to do.

I think IPv6 does bring some usefulness, but I just don't foresee everybody changing how their internal networks operate. And I can also see a huge amount of consumer type stuff taking years before it has transitioned. IPv4 isn't going to go away overnight.

Re:It will be a pain in the ass to remember...

[compro01]

IPv6 is the final solution to the NAT question.

Now we just need a cure to the people who have been beating their heads against a wall long enough that they think that NAT is/was a good thing.