One of our readers claims to have spotted a phenomenon, which he wishes to share and thereby warn about. Here is his input:

This post is particularly interesting for the reason that there are many reasons why IPv6 is needed and the canard about address spaces is always offered instead as a troll to distract from:

• less overhead in routers, as the result of a more concise and modular header format
• better addressing and routing infrastructure through a more efficient and hierarchical routing
• Stateless and stateful address configuration, eliminating the need for the network security hole called DHCP
• Built in IPsec
• Better support for QOS (Quality of service) in the protocol fields
• It's extensible, the protocol itself allows more headers to be added
• More flexible and efficient routing and handoff of mobile hosts

The main barrier seems to be that *one* software vendor's products fail to support IPv6. MSIE has been holding back the WWW, Windows in general has been holding back the net.

Linux and BSD distros have supported full IPv6 out of the box for years now.

Here are some links I meant to add:

• Vista not playing well with IPv6



• Microsoft Vista's IPv6: Dangerous Information Leak?



• Microsoft Vista's IPv6 Raises New Security Concerns"

(Note the dates of the last pair.)

Some further readings are appended below. Be careful what you read about IPv6. Microsoft, having fallen behind, is likely to suppress or slow down its adoption using actions and words (FUD), just as it did with other advancements over the past two decades. Technical progress is risky and potentially disruptive if you are a monopoly. ⬆

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Red Hat Enterprise Linux Receives Department of Defense IPv6 Certification

The certification demonstrates Red Hat’s ongoing commitment to meeting the growing demands of government agencies and enterprises as they adapt to the next-generation Internet.

Varonis Extends DatAdvantage Support to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 and 5 Environments

...availability of DatAdvantage version 3.7, which extends support to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 and 5 and provides the foundation for Varonis to quickly add support for other Linux distributions such as SUSE, Ubuntu, etc.

NTT America and Internet Systems Consortium Advance IPv6 for Open Source Community and General Public

"The FreeBSD Project greatly appreciates the opportunity to use ISC's high-performance IPv6 transit," says Robert Watson, president of the FreeBSD Foundation and Hosted@ISC participant. He continued, "As early adopters and implementers of IPv6 networking, this gives us the chance to exercise and improve IPv6 support in our operating system, as well as serve our current IPv6-ready users better."

Vendors worried Vista IPv6 too slippery for managed networks

Researchers have raised new questions about the security of Vista's IPv6 implementation. James Hoagland from Symantec and Suresh Krishnan from Ericsson wrote an Internet-Draft that calls attention to the Teredo protocol and the fact that many firewalls don't understand this protocol, and therefore can't inspect the packets embedded within it.

Vista’s IPv6: Not an easy upgrade

If you think migrating to IPv6 is as simple as upgrading to Microsoft Windows Vista, think again.

Vista not playing well with IPv6

Early adopters of Microsoft's new Vista operating system are reporting problems with its implementation of IPv6, a long-anticipated upgrade to the Internet's primary protocol.

Black Hat 2007: Vista users urged to beware of IPv6Black Hat 2007: Vista users urged to beware of IPv6

Hoagland noted that the Cupertino, Calif.-based Symantec has already discovered one Teredo/IPv6-related flaw in Vista, which Microsoft patched in the MS07-038 security update released last month. According to the researchers, the Teredo interface in Vista was not properly handling certain network traffic, allowing remote attackers to bypass firewall-blocking rules and obtain sensitive information via crafted IPv6 traffic.

The $200 Billion Lunch: We're switching to IPv6, dontcha know, and it might be worth it.

To a certain extent, it is Sputnik all over again. Some people see this as a place where there will be a commercial disadvantage unless the U.S. keeps up. It is comparable to NTSC vs. PAL television standards (hint: PAL is better but we don't have it).

[...]

And what is happening in the USA? Well we have Net Neutrality. We have a telco rebuilding a national monopoly. We have Cisco and Microsoft working together on Network Admission Control (NAC). I can see a time in the near future when they'll try to charge me for every PC in my house. While China is building a national resource, our government is letting companies turn the public Internet into an expensive private toll road.

Embedded Linux vendor adds IPv4/IPv6 stack

In March of 2006, Wind River paid $20 million for Interpeak, a Swedish networking software vendor offering stacks for routers, access equipment, WiFi nodes, and small-footprint networked devices. Interpeak was noted for shipping the first TCP/IP stacks for Linux hosts and routers that were certified "IPv6-ready."

Entire city of Vista users can't access the internet

Lundis Energi blamed Microsoft because Vista has got a bug and it isn't going to change the configuration of the server just to cope with the flaw.

FLOSS Weekly 14: Jeremy Allison of Samba

'In the section of the interview from around 33m30s to 39m00 Jeremy Allison reports how he was told that the Microsoft team implementing SMB2 were ordered to "f**k with Samba".'

Longhorn server and Ubuntu do they still play together?

There real question however is can linux boxes still join and authenticate against Active Directory domains running at Native Longhorn Server levels. Well the answer a non surprising NO!