U.S. military strong-arming IT industry on IPv6
networkworld.com
U.S. military strong-arming IT industry on IPv6
1–10 of 23 posts
Re: U.S. military strong-arming IT industry on IPv6
#2Sounds like arm twisting, but does anyone have an alternative plan?
Re: U.S. military strong-arming IT industry on IPv6
#3If 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.
Re: U.S. military strong-arming IT industry on IPv6
#4Like 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.
Re: U.S. military strong-arming IT industry on IPv6
#5Dan Bernstein outlines why it has been so difficult to transition to IPv6:
Re: U.S. military strong-arming IT industry on IPv6
#6IPv6 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.
Re: U.S. military strong-arming IT industry on IPv6
#7Nice. 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 :)
Re: U.S. military strong-arming IT industry on IPv6
#8Just 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.
Re: U.S. military strong-arming IT industry on IPv6
#9Nice. 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 :)
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.
Re: U.S. military strong-arming IT industry on IPv6
#10IPv6 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.
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...