[CentOS] IPV4 is nearly depleted, are you ready for IPV6?

Ryan Wagoner rswagoner at gmail.com
Sun Dec 5 14:27:54 UTC 2010


On Sun, Dec 5, 2010 at 6:50 AM, Rudi Ahlers <Rudi at softdux.com> wrote:
> Seeing as IPV4 is near it's end of life
> (http://www.internetnews.com/infra/article.php/3915471/IPv4+Nearing+Final+Days.htm),
> I'm curios as who know whether everyone is ready for the changeover to
> IPV6?
>
> Is anyone using it in production already, and what are your experiences with it?
>
> --
> Kind Regards
> Rudi Ahlers
> SoftDux
>
> Website: http://www.SoftDux.com
> Technical Blog: http://Blog.SoftDux.com
> Office: 087 805 9573
> Cell: 082 554 7532

I've been using IPv6 with Vyatta through a tunnel broker (he.net). I'm
running a dual stack configuration and have a few websites enabled. I
have been holding off my email as Zimbra isn't fully compliant. The
other holdup is that ISPs, like Verizon FIOS, aren't supporting it.  I
called Verizon FIOS's business support line and when I asked about
obtaining a IPVv6 /64 or /48, he asked me what IPv6 was. For now the
tunnel broker is great, but it adds complexity and there is no SLA.

What bothers me about IPv6 is that they used : to separate the address
portions. This makes extra work to go directly to the IP in a browser,
configure Apache, etc as it has to be put in []. You also can't browse
IPv6 network shares by IP. At least in Windows you have to replace :
with - and append . ipv6-literal.net

Stateless auto configuration works great, but I don't use it on my
servers. The address becomes too long to keep track of so I have
manually configured them. It looks like most sites supporting IPv6
have done the same.

With stateless configuration on the clients I loose the dynamic DNS
that DHCP provides. The DHCP6 server on CentOS 5.5 doesn't support
dynamic DNS updates either. I use it to only hand out the DNS server
address. CentOS 6 will come with the ISC DHCPv6 server that will
support dynamic DNS. When that happens I plan to switch over to DHCP
entirely so DNS will be updated. It is really annoying to see last
login by some random IPv6 address on my CentOS boxes.

It is great to see that NAT is gone. No more UPnP or NAT port mapping
nonsense. On my Vyatta box I have just blocked all incoming IPv6
traffic that is no established or related. I think allowed only ICMP
echo request to any IPv6 address and ports for my servers. This makes
it just as secure as IPv4 with NAT.

The other issue I foresee is all the Windows XP users. Windows XP
doesn't support a native IPv6 implementation. It can only query DNS
through IPv4. Microsoft needs to pull the plug on Windows XP. Although
running IPv6 only is a few if not more years away.

Ryan



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