I have my own personal reason not to adopt IPv6. When I was setting up my home network and upgraded to Vista, I was unable to easily connect my laptop to the wireless router using WPA2 with AES encryption. I could connect but it took a lot of manual diddling after I booted up my laptop to make the connection to either the network. Sometimes I was able to connect to the network but not to the internet.
I looked through every blog and user group that I could find regarding my router, WPA2 encryption, and Vista. I never found anything that helped me. I was ready to go back to Windows XP. Finally, just last weekend, I read a totally unrelated article that suggested turning off IPv6 on existing networks for compatibility purposes. The default in Vista is to turn on both IPv6 and IPv4. I figured that if IPv6 didn’t work, then IPv4 would take over. Boy, was I ever wrong.
I turned off IPv6 and my laptop now quickly and happily connect to the network, the internet, and my printers. A simple, easy fix that took me months (though not that many man-hours) to figure out.
Now, Network World has come up with another reason for waiting to adopt IPv6:
Now it turns out that one of these IPv6 benefits — autoconfiguration — may not be such a boon for corporate network managers. A growing number of IPv6 experts say that corporations probably will skip autoconfiguration and instead stick with DHCP, which has been updated to support IPv6.
Autoconfiguration vs. DHCPv6 has become a point of contention among IPv6 proponents. As recently as last month, the IETF — the standards body that created IPv6 and DHCPv6 — held a lively online debate about rethinking autoconfiguration in light of DHCPv6.
“This is a widely discussed issue. Which is better: DHCPv6 or autoconfiguration?” says Timothy Winters, software engineering manager at the University of New Hampshire’s Inter Operability Lab. The UNH-IOL operates Moonv6, the world’s largest IPv6 test bed.
Winters sees the commercial software industry starting to back DHCPv6 because of the additional controls and tracking and debugging features it provides. “Moonv6 tried to run DHCPv6 testing two and a half years ago, and we only had two or three companies that did servers and software,” he says. “A year later, we had 14 companies…We’ve definitely seen the DHCPv6 implementations explode.”
The biggest backer of DHCPv6 is Cisco, which has supported DHCPv6 in its IOS since 2003, and also supports it in Cisco Network Register (CNR). The company says the next version of CNR, expected out by early 2008, will feature parity between DHCPv4 and DHCPv6. “From a security standpoint and for information assurance, network managers all still want visibility into their networks,” says Dave West, director of field operations for Cisco’s Federal Center of Excellence. “We believe the demand is going to be there for DHCPv6.”
…
DHCPv6 … provides stateful address-configuration. DHCPv6 servers pass out IP addresses and service information to clients, and both the server and the client retain this information to prevent address conflicts. DHCPv6 lets network managers know the devices connected to the network and their IP addresses. Corporate network managers have grown accustomed to this level of visibility into their networks because they use DHCP with their IPv4 networks. Backers of DHCPv6 say they’ll want to keep this visibility into their IPv6 networks. “People want to know who is on their network, and DHCPv6 is the way to do it,” Winters says. “IT people understand how DHCP works in IPv4, and the IPv6 version is not that different. It’s easy for IT people to wrap their brains around DHCPv6 as opposed to autoconfiguration, which doesn’t exist for IPv4.”
Now, IPv6 has some great qualities about it, not least of all its ability to manage an incredibly huge address space and better security. It’s a wonderful idea but my belief is that it will take several years before it is widely adopted.
Leave a comment