NetBurner Community Forum

We have been promising IPV6 for a long time.
Its finally landed unambiguously on the top of my to-do list,
and I've been making progress...

We have a good test setup that lets me exercise things...
and
Tonight the monster opened one eye, it now answers IPV6 pings...

This is going to take a lot of work before its ready to send anyone...
I expect to have a beta some time in very late Q3.

Paul

Very nice.

Are the internals of IPv6 more complicated than IPv4, or is it not as thoroughly documented because it still has that new protocol smell?

IPV6 is reasonably well documented.
Its enough different from IPV4 that figuring out exactly how to slip it into the existing system without breaking things is hard.
It also has a huge number of interesting options that all need to be tested....
The test environment is 80% of the job...

No one is actually deploying it in significant ways so deciding what parts are needed and what parts will go unused is really hard...
For instance Do you need autoconfig, static config or DHCP V6? (Brand X's answer is yes,no,no)
Do I need to redo autoupdate and ipsetup to run on a V6 only system?
Do you need to support the V6 MIB in SNMP?

Do you need to nativity support 6 over 4 tunnels?
Can you find a 6 over 4 tunnel host that does not require crypto authentication?
Can I ship crypto authentication in our base software without violating our export rules?

How much do I need to tune performance? Or can I count on moores law to fix performance issues
before the code is widely used?


Over and Over we have the following exchange....

Customer: We must have IPV6...
NetBurner: what parts of IPV6?
Customer: I don't know its a line item in something we are bidding on.
Netburner: Can you ask your customer exactly what features they are using?
Customer: We asked our customer... they have never done IPV6 before so they don't know.....
Customer: But we MUST have it or we cant bid.
NetBurner: What parts must you have...
Customer: All of it.

I have a hard time seeing any real use case for IPV6 in a Netburner. I would expect that 99+% of them are going to be located on some type of private network (even if it has port forwarding to it). I don't really see any compelling reason for most private networks to be anything other than IPv4.

I'd love to hear the compelling reason of why implementing IPv6 in it would matter, other than someone that doesn't know anything about it wrote a spec that requires it!

Scott

I'll give you one use case...

Every smart electric meter in the world wants to be network attached.
This could be done with some sort of IPV4 NAT tunnel, but if you make it a 6 to 4 tunnel
then the device management and configuration becomes easier as the (now globablly addressable) IP address of the meter is
directly derived from the tunnel prefix and the MAC address of the meter, no additional bookkeeping required.

Hi Paul,
IPv6 is now required to bid on government contracts. That is why you get the "We need it but I don't know" rhetoric from everyone. Typical government procurement garbage. It's on the requirements sheet so we gotta have it...
We need it too. What level I dunno but my boss has been asked by different customers of ours three times in the past few weeks about when we might have it on our platform.
Whenever you have something to test, let me know.

Mike