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North American Network Operators Group Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical Re: DHCPv6, was: Re: IPv6 Finally gets off the ground
On 16-apr-2007, at 23:42, David W. Hankins wrote: Router Advertisements let you automatically configure as many IPv6 addresses as you feel like. Remember that in XP, which Iljitsch recently cited to support his claim of "years of operating system support," you must click IPv6 into your configuration. It probably wants your XP install disc, or something like that. You have to enable IPv6. After that, stateless autoconfiguration takes care of your addresses and default gateway. No support for DNS lookups over IPv6, though, as far as I've been able to discern. But there are more operating systems than just Windows. Basic IPv6 support has been available in most of them since the early 2000s. "There has been router and operating system support for years" is a statement which predicates that the World has no technical excuse for not running IPv6 globally edge-to-edge already. That's an interesting way of putting it. I would concede that you can't reasonably run IPv6-only today, the DNS situation being an important reason for that. But if you want to run dual stack, and you're willing to get rid of some old stuff to accomplish that, you should be able to. I've been running IPv6 for years, literally longer than I can remember. In the beginning. I could only ping6 and traceroute6 from a FreeBSD box. These days, I ssh and ftp over IPv6, read and send email from/to my server over IPv6, I visit IPv6-enabled web pages and more, all with software that came with the system without specifically enabling anything. (On a Mac.) Some people even run IPv6 without realizing it. This is common at RIPE and IETF meetings and the like, where there is a conference network with one or more IPv6 routers. And the first home gateway that provides IPv6 connectivity out of the box has arrived in the form of the latest Apple Airport Express base station. RTADV won't help you here (tho they keep talking about putting domain-search and nameservers in it), and neither will DHCPv6 as it turns out (it carries a domain-search list, but not "your domain suffix" which is more what WPAD should really want). This is not "years of operating system support." What has had "years of operating system support," is the unfortunate practice of acquiring option code 252 in DHCPv4. Yes, despite the incredible level of IPv6 activity in the IETF some rather fundamental things never got the attention they needed. It reminds me of the situation with ISDN 11 years ago. Dial-up was pretty mature by then, and worked without much trouble. However, connecting to an ISP over ISDN was a nightmare of incompatible framings, hand-installing drivers and the like. However, the main issue was that there wasn't a generally accepted standard way of doing things. Once everyone settled on synchronous PPP and the drivers were tailored for that, it was smooth sailing. The same thing will happen for IPv6 DNS etc configuration once people realize that running dual stack isn't a long term solution.
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