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IT Pros Blast Google Over Android's Refusal To Play Nice With IPv6

Posted by Soulskill on from the do-as-we-say-not-as-we-do dept.

alphadogg writes: The widespread popularity of Android devices and the general move to IPv6 has put some businesses in a tough position, thanks to Android's lack of support for a central component in the newer standard. DHCPv6 is an outgrowth of the DHCP protocol used in the older IPv4 standard – it's an acronym for 'dynamic host configuration protocol,' and is a key building block of network management. Nevertheless, Google's wildly popular Android devices – which accounted for 78% of all smartphones shipped worldwide in the first quarter of this year – don't support DHCPv6 for address assignment.

2 of 287 comments (clear)

  1. Google's IPv6 SMTP servers by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Google's IPv6 support for mail is what annoys me. I have a static non-tunneled IPv6 address for my server, have reverse DNS set up for it that resolves properly, have SPF and DKIM records set up properly, and they still refuse to accept mail from the server, even though they accept my IPv4 mail just fine. Lots of other folks have been having the same problem, and it really makes me wonder why Google's even bothering with IPv6 SMTP when they're refusing mail from so many legitimate (i.e. non-spam) hosts.

  2. Re:No support for dynamic address assignment?!? by mellon · · Score: 5, Insightful

    IPv6 supports stateless IPv6 address assignment using SLAAC (StateLess Address AutoConfiguration). There is no need for a DHCP server. There are a number of reasons why using DHCPv6 to allocate individual addresses is a bad idea. If you've ever operated a DHCP server, you know about DHCP's failure modes, so I don't have to tell you. However, people get comfortable operating DHCP servers, and there's job security in it, so there are a lot of IPv4 old-timers who simply can't imagine a world without DHCP.

    Speaking as one of the authors of RFC 3315, I think that Google is, if not right, at least not wrong. I would not personally want to have to set up a DHCPv6 server just to allocate individual IPv6 addresses. Talk about driving a nail with a sledgehammer. DHCPv6 is a great solution for the problem of configuring CPE routers with IPv6 prefixes. Addresses? Not so much.