
U.S. military strong-arming IT industry on IPv6 - m3mb3r
http://www.networkworld.com/news/2010/122010-dod-strongarms-suppliers-on-ipv6.html?hpg1=bn
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patrickgzill
IPv6 is such a mess that the DoD needs to ensure that when IPv6 is claimed as
"supported" by a vendor, that it actually does work. There are plenty of bugs,
corner cases, and limitations in what vendors are offering.

This "strong-arming" is not that much different than asking a new car salesman
why he is selling GM while personally driving an Audi.

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ghshephard
Actually, the IPv6 stacks I've been seeing from Cisco are starting to look
pretty good. The protocol, itself, shouldn't cause much in the way of concern
for most network engineers. I'm interested to hear if the problems (which were
myriad, and painful early on) you ran into in the last 10 years are still
present in the more recent stacks from your vendor?

Speaking as a Network Engineer - I actually quite like IPv6. It took about 3+
years for my eyes (and brain) to get used to seeing 128 bit addresses, and
remembering them, but I'm pretty good now. I think that's what the article is
saying, too - the DoD wants people to start getting used to the protocol so
that it doesn't take a crack team to deploy the protocol. As one who
interviews network engineers frequently, I have yet to run into more than half
a dozen out of 100 (and that's being generous) who could speak coherently
about IPv6, and have never run into one who knew something as simple as what a
solicited nodes multicast address was (basically the address you use for the
IPv6 equivalent of ARP).

So - the technology is getting there, now we need to get the network engineers
moving along...

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kqr2
Dan Bernstein outlines why it has been so difficult to transition to IPv6:

<http://cr.yp.to/djbdns/ipv6mess.html>

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randallsquared
...and that appears to be from 2002! :(

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CapitalistCartr
Like Walmart and barcodes, maybe this is the final push that's needed. As for
strong-arming, I'd say they have every right to demand suppliers who eat their
own dog food. They've got a lot at stake.

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borogrove
Just the other day I was pleasantly surprised to notice my MacBook using IPv6
to stream a song over to my Apple TV (remote speakers). For grins I disabled
v6 on the interface to see what would happen. The stream cut out briefly and
then resumed over IPv4.

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meric
If the US military can save us from depleting IP addresses maybe they'll save
us from running out of oil, too.

Damn... It seems to take a government agency to keep the world spinning.

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iwwr
Solar power humvees won't happen very soon.

But the US military is one of the World's largest oil consumers.

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khafra
He's probably referring to DoD-funded research efforts like this:
<http://www.google.com/search?q=algae+oil+dod>

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jrockway
Nice. I am pleased to say that even my TV has a globally-routable IPv6
address. (Unfortunately, I've never actually had physical IPv6 connectivity
anywhere, so I always have to VPN to my internal IPv4 network. I have SSH'd
from my server with IPv6 connectivity, though, and it worked :)

Oh well, at least I'm cooler than my friends :)

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rm-rf
A globally routable v6 network isn't too hard to do at home with
tunnelbroker.net and similar services. A Dlink DIR-825 has enough v6 support
to hold up it's end of the tunnel and route a /64. Clients (Mac, Windows,
Unix's) 'just work'. Tunnelbroker does the hard part.

To move a whole enterprise is hard.

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ghshephard
Moving a whole enterprise turns out to be remarkably simple. Most OS stacks
from the last 5+ years have support for IPv6 - even windows XP allows a pretty
straightforward upgrade. Enable the client stacks, Turn it on on your routers,
and voila - your enterprise is now IPv6 enabled. Add it to your SSL VPN - IPv6
from home. The Dual-Stack capability really does make it bog simple.

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wglb
Sounds like arm twisting, but does anyone have an alternative plan?

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tomjen3
Fix the spec there is no reason it shouldn't be possible to have a package
with an ipv4 destination and an ipv6 source (all oses knows about ipv6) except
that those who wrote the specs forgot the iron law of software - nothing, no
matter how good it is - succeed without being backwards compatible. That's why
c++ and Java are a success, but Lisp isn't.

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nitrogen
There is one problem. The IPv6-enabled equipment that provides Internet access
to the IPv6 sender knows how to route an IPv4 address, but the IPv4 equipment
at the recipient's ISP might not know how to route back to the IPv6 source.

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tomjen3
They would have to replace the equipment anyway

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nitrogen
...which kind of defeats the point of backward compatibility, doesn't it?

