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Linux Foundation Says All Major Distros Are IPv6 Compliant
Posted by
Soulskill
on Sun Nov 30, 2008 09:35 AM
from the getting-things-done dept.
from the getting-things-done dept.
ruphus13 points out news from the Linux Foundation, which announced that all major Linux distributions meet certification requirements for the US Department of Defense's IPv6 mandates. The announcement credits work done by the IPv6 Workgroup, whose members include IBM, HP, Nokia-Siemens, Novell and Red Hat. Quoting:
"Linux has had relatively robust IPv6 support since 2005, but further work was needed for the open source platform to achieve full compliance with DoD standards. The Linux Foundation's IPv6 workgroup analyzed the DoD certification requirements and identified key areas where Linux's IPv6 stack needed adjustments in order to guarantee compliance. They collaboratively filled in the gaps and have succeeded in bringing the shared technology into alignment with the DoD's standards."
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Embedded Linux does ipv6 too (Score:5, Insightful)
Many embedded linux devices are IPV6 compliant. Even my AXIS webcam can talk ipv6.
Unfortunately, my ISP, RoadRunner is stuck in dark ages.
Re: (Score:2)
I lease a T1 from Speakeasy and while I'm generally satisfied with the service they still don't offer IPv6.
On a T1?!
Talk about dark ages. :(
Embedded Toilets do ipv6 too (Score:2)
"Unfortunately, my ISP, RoadRunner is stuck in dark ages."
It's a bummer when your toilet can't get it's own IP address.
Re:Embedded Toilets do ipv6 too (Score:4, Funny)
The large AND small flush want their own, just like the lid and seat!
Don't get me started about the light switch, extraction fan and deodorant dispenser...
Parent
Re:Embedded Linux does ipv6 too (Score:5, Funny)
With the US auto industry going down the shitter, some /8s could be reassigned real soon.
Viva IPv4!
You mean, they are going to be ".gov" domains, real soon, at your expense.
Parent
Re:Embedded Linux does ipv6 too (Score:4, Informative)
We're going through a /8 about every month. Even if several of these are freed up it doesn't push the exhaustion date back very far.
Parent
Re:Embedded Linux does ipv6 too (Score:5, Informative)
> What happens if NAT is used all over the place? You could imagine a bunch of
> subnets that use one address to the outside world but have hundreds or
> thousands of machines internally.
It *is* used all over the place. It's even used on an ISP-wide scale (expect that to become more common in the west). NAT delayed IP address exhaustion for a few years, a few years ago. The current rate of IP usage is what's happening *with* widespread use of NAT.
> There's a lot to be said for NAT from a security point of view too. Since you
> need to open up holes manually for incoming services, incoming connections
> for anything else will be blocked which makes it impossible for people to
> exploit most security flaws on the machines behind the router.
You can get all of that from a stateful firewall that blocks inbound connections by default.
> Reading between the lines it seems like IPv6 was a revolutionary solution to
> running out of address space. NAT was an evolutionary one. As usual the
> market has picked the evolutionary solution and more purist types are whining
> about it.
NAT isn't a solution at all, it's a way to delay the inevitable. It has successfully done that, into approximately 2011-2012. What it doesn't do is change the fundamental problem, it's not possible to use it *enough* to hold off exhaustion indefinitely.
Breaking end-to-end connectivity isn't the primary concern. This has already largely happened with NAT, and will continue to happen to a certain extent with IPv6 because we'll be using stateful firewalls. We can deal with this for most home users.
The problem is that NAT still consumes IPs, and other hosts like servers really do need to be reachable. The market prefers NAT now because exhaustion hasn't happened yet, and as the last few months have demonstrated, the market is remarkably good at ignoring problems for as long as possible.
Purist types *are* whining about it. But pragmatic types like me are also concerned that people like you seem to think NAT is something we can use later as a solution, when we've already been using it for years as a way to buy time.
Parent
Re:Embedded Linux does ipv6 too (Score:4, Funny)
Yes, your toaster does need its own IP as part of its TRM (toast rights management). "Smart" toasters are subsidized by bread manufacturers, and as such require you (the user) to only install certified bread into the device. TRM was designed so the bread manufacturers can be assured that their (subsidized) product (the smart toaster) is being used in the legal manner.
Note that GNU/Bread will not operate in TRM enabled toasters as this reduces the proffitability (sp?) of smart toasters.
Parent
Re:Embedded Linux does ipv6 too (Score:4, Interesting)
"The right way would have been to extend the address space while still obeying to the KISS principle."
The IETF has considered so many proposals along this line that it just produces eye-rolls from the greybeards now. They don't work any better than IPv4 w/ NAPT extensions, they still don't preserve backward compatibility with IPv4, and they don't solve the problems that IPv6 does.
If you think you're smarter than everybody who's tried to do this before, then write up an Internet Draft. What's stopping you?
Parent
Re:Embedded Linux does ipv6 too (Score:4, Funny)
Water is a liquid.
Your turn
Parent
Re:Embedded Linux does ipv6 too (Score:5, Funny)
GNU is not UNIX.
Parent
Re:Embedded Linux does ipv6 too (Score:4, Funny)
GIMP is an utterly stupid name.
There, I said it.
Parent
Re:Embedded Linux does ipv6 too (Score:5, Funny)
EMACS is a decent operating system, but it could use a better text editor.
Parent
Re:Embedded Linux does ipv6 too (Score:5, Funny)
Water is a liquid.
I'm Canadian, you insensitive clod!
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Water is a liquid.
I'm Canadian, you insensitive clod!
ok then... beer is a liquid
Re:Embedded Linux does ipv6 too (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Re:Embedded Linux does ipv6 too (Score:4, Insightful)
Would you stop giving the damn ISP's more reasons to slack off on implementing IPv6!!!
When their customers do their own tunnelling, ISPs loose the ability to perform their own traffic engineering, and loose money.
Once they see that they are loosing money because people are implementing their own tunnelling, ISPs will rush to implement native IPv6, in a form that they can control.
Parent
so i see talk of ipv6 more and more.... (Score:2, Interesting)
You'll see IPv6 . . . (Score:3, Insightful)
. . . when you see IPv6.
Until your ISP starts offering it, don't worry about it.
Everything that is worth buying has been IPv6 compliant for years.
The only thing that is missing for IPv6, is well, how about an IPv6 net, to the end user.
Re:You'll see IPv6 . . . (Score:4, Interesting)
A major French ISP - Free (second largest ISP after Orange) - is offering IPv6 to anyone asking for it (it's an option in their control pannel, disabled by default). :)
It would be interesting to see how much peoples activated that option
Another smaller one here have been offering IPv6 since ages (can't remember its name though)
A major mass-hosting facility - OVH (doing buiness in France and doing massive deployment currently in europe) is providing IPv6 to all its servers (hosted or housed).
They are both new-commers (compared to the country operator / old hosting facilities) - which may explain such massive deployment (they have only new hardware everywhere)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Except for routers. I've not seen an IPv6 compliant router yet. I'm sure they must exist, but you don't see them in the likes of PC World.
But, until ISPs start offering IPv6, an IPv6 ready router isn't going to be much of a selling point.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Not since v24SP1
There's a different version of ddwrt that does support IPv6 that is all but hidden on their site. But the standard dd-wrt doesn't do IPv6 anymore.
Re:You'll see IPv6 . . . (Score:4, Interesting)
Everything that is worth buying has been IPv6 compliant for years.
Hmm..
iphone - nope.
xbox 360 - nope.
PS3 - nope.
That's 3 things worth buying that definately aren't.. and I'm not even including home routers on that list which are a glaring example of 'not ipv6 compliant'.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
The advantage is you get rid of your NAT. You can for example use it to access your computer remotly with ssh or file sharing, or get IP telephone provided separately from your ISP.
You can turn on 6to4 in your OS, it will give your whole home network global IPv6 addresses with your IPv4 connected computer as router. Some OSes might require further configuration.
Around here (Sweden) many ISPs actually have a local 6to4 router so the speed is the same, but in some locations you will get a longer route if you
Re:so i see talk of ipv6 more and more.... (Score:5, Interesting)
I, too, am using 6to4 at home in order to get rid of NAT, but lately I've been having great trouble when traveling around with my IPv6-enabled laptop (running Debian).
See, whenever I get to a public access point (which uses public IPv4 addresses, rather than a private 192.168.x.x net) it turns out that any Vista computers connected to the same link auto-configure themselves to use 6to4 and then advertise over ICMP that they are willing to route traffic through their 6to4 net. However, it turns out that they just drop the traffic! My laptop, not knowing that, though, will try to route IPv6 traffic through them nevertheless, which just makes every IPv6 site (including my own) stop working. Viva Vista!
Does anyone know why Vista does this, and whether it's possible to prevent or work around it somehow?
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
That is an interesting case. I wish I could point out what you should be doing differently, but it isn't obvious to me. When you have a public IPv4 address, you could run your own 6to4 gateway. But of course if you have a network with public IPv4 addresses to multiple machines, you us
Re:so i see talk of ipv6 more and more.... (Score:4, Insightful)
NAT for firewalling is really an abuse of the protocol. Instead, dump it and use IPv6, then have the router filter the packets. That way, instead of having to rewrite the packets, the router just has to make a drop or forward decision.
If you make DROP the default decision and then add specific ALLOW rules, you'll get the same semantics as NAT with a lower load on the router
AN added benefit (FOR NOW anyway) is that most ssh dictionary attacks are against IPv4 addresses. If your internal machines can only be reached through v6, you won't have to worry about those.
Even if the crackers update to use v6, they won't be nearly as successful since they would first have to guess which dozen or so v6 addresses out of the possible billions on your 6to4 prefix actually have something listening. Sending out a few billion probe packets wouldn't really be a good option for them, especially when someone might have a honeypot assigned hundreds of IPs (making it by far the most likely machine to be attacked).
Parent
Maybe (Score:4, Insightful)
In reality IPv6 is about infrastructure, so if it is all done right then your average Joe shouldn't see much of an impact. In most cases the average user leaves their setting in automatic mode, so as long as the OS and corresponding application are already IPv6 aware then they won't notice until they need to use a numerical address. If they have a home router, then they may find that they need to buy a new one as the manufacturer is only releasing IPv6 aware firmware for routers manufactured after a certain date.
There are still plenty of issues before everything is working right on both the client and server front. Issues still in place:
- network hardware not IPv6 compliant (the only compliant home router for the moment is the Apple Airport)
- network administrators oblivious to IPv6
- ISPs not preparing for IPv6
- libraries for popular computer programming languages not IPv6 ready. Take Perl libwww for example.
- people saying that no one else is doing anything, so they won't do anything either - the classic sheep mentality
I would like to see stuff like Zeroconf (aka Bonjour, Avahi) become common place on all OSs (this include Windows), or at least if these routers could add the names of computers in their DHCP table (including themselves) in their DNS directory, so typing in numerical IP addresses should not be necessary.
Parent
Let's not forget (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Yup. In fact, back in the day, the IPv6 support in FreeBSD was the determining factor in my choice to run FreeBSD rather than any then-current distribution of GNU/Linux. Being focused on networking, I didn't have a dog in the OS race, I just needed IPv6 support, and FreeBSD won hands-down. I have enjoyed the blessings of FreeBSD ever since. Even so many years later, IPv6 support on my DD-WRT (Linux) access point is quite non-intuitive and hackish.
Big shout-out to the fine KAME team, especially the late
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Possibly because the Linux Foundation has a history of running press releases saying 'Linux can now do something that *BSD could do ages ago!' only without mentioning the fact that Linux is late to the party, and in some cases not mentioning the fact that the code that they are so proud of was ported to Linux from one of the BSDs.
Anything they release should be mentally tagged troll.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Is BSD even relevant anymore? - Serious question.
Additionally, there has been IPv6 support in Linux for a very long time already, what was being said was major distributions showin
IPv6 has been known to be needed since 1991 (Score:3, Interesting)
Source: http://www.mit.edu/hacker/part4.html [mit.edu]
So why the fuck hasn't it been adopted yet?
------
Anyway, does anyone have any sources as to know the other "big" OS's (MS Windows, Mac OS, the BSD's etc.) were able to speak IPv6 (if they are able to at all?)?
Also, I've tried to find information about whether FreeDOS can do IPv6, but couldn't. Could anyone help there?
-----
Finally, the beauty of FLOSS.
Re: (Score:2)
So why the fuck hasn't it been adopted yet?
Because that's your job. Get the fuck over here and migrate my network, stat.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Anyway, does anyone have any sources as to know the other "big" OS's (MS Windows, Mac OS, the BSD's etc.) were able to speak IPv6 (if they are able to at all?)?
The KAME stack was completed in March 2006. It implements IPv6 and IPsec and is used by FreeBSD, BSD/OS, OpenBSD, NetBSD,DragonFlyBSD, and OS X. Linux achieved a comparable degree of support around a year later. KAME snapshots were incorporated in these operating systems before the project was completed, and enough of the protocol to be useful has been supported by them since around 2000. Linux does not use KAME, but I don't know how much (if any) code they borrow from it.
Itojun did some really amazin
Re:IPv6 has been known to be needed since 1991 (Score:4, Insightful)
IPv6 isn't backwards-compatible with IPv4, and a lot of networks have been really slow to convert over. In most case, they have to spend money to do this conversion, because they have older hardware without full IPv6 compatibility.
Adoption is slow because IPv6 isn't backwards-compatible, and because it doesn't have enough benefits to outweigh that problem. No conspiracy or anything. (I think it's damn stupid that IPv6 has approx. 40 kajillion IP addresses, and yet they didn't bother to map the existing 4 billion there anywhere.)
Parent
Re:IPv6 has been known to be needed since 1991 (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
How about a report on ISPs? (Score:5, Interesting)
Now that I know Linux joins the ranks of IPv6 compliant OSs, I just need an ISP that supports IPv6. The problem is, in North America at least, is that there are still few to no ISPs providing IPv6 addresses. Instead I have to resort to tunnel providers (some listed here [wikipedia.org]). What we need is a list of major internet service providers in North America and an indication of their IPv6 readiness and what they excuse is for not starting the migration.
In order to get ISPs moving we could each mail the one we use and ask them when the plan to offer IPv6 addresses.
Some 'cool stuff' using IPv6: https://www.sixxs.net/misc/coolstuff/ [sixxs.net]
Re:How about a report on ISPs? (Score:4, Informative)
https://www.sixxs.net/faq/connectivity/?faq=native [sixxs.net]
ISP IPv6 listing.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Catching up on the competition (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
The support in win2k was an experimental addon published by microsoft research, it was never an official feature.
It was XP which first introduced support in the base distro, but it was not turned on by default and if autoconfig didn't work you had to use the cli tools to configure it. Also it wouldn't do DNS over ipv6 so you still need ipv4 connectivity for your dns at least.
Linux had support a lot earlier as you pointed out, as did digital unix (aka tru64 unix), the bsd's got support fairly early too. It
Re: (Score:2)
But yeah, here come the history I-did-it-before-you wars, look in the thread below you, someone already said BSD did it first before MS.
Oh snap.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Until Vista, SMB/CIFS didn't support IPv6, so sharing resources over an IPv6 local network didn't work. On top of that, 2005 is the year the "experimental" status was removed. In fact this status is rather conservative and many distros routinely ship kernels with experimental options enabled (e.g. tickless kernel, the WMI drivers, etc.)
Re: (Score:2)
Well, there's 'support' and 'support'. See this post in this very thread...
http://linux.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1046105&cid=25933393 [slashdot.org]
MS Vista claimed broken, IPv6, Apple AND Linux?
I'm getting the popcorn...
Re:Catching up on the competition (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Apple didn't spend much at all. They use the KAME stack, which was developed by a consortium of Japanese companies for BSD-family systems. It was started in 1998 and achieved full compliance in 2006. Apple just pulled in the code and merged it. Since it already ran on BSD/OS, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD and DragonflyBSD, this was not a huge undertaking.
While the OS itself is IPv6 compliant, stuff like the Finder and certain GUI based applications (Network Utility) is still oblivious to IPv6. Although not an Ap
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Samba works on ipv6 but I think the OSX version doesn't. Things go *really* screwy if you use an ipv6 enabled samba in a Win2003 domain, so they probably disabled it to avoid problems.
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Exist a migration roadmap for it? or there are still showstoppers?
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