IPv6 Must Be Enabled On All US Government Sites By Sunday 179
darthcamaro writes "Agencies of the U.S. Federal Government are racing to comply with a September 30th deadline to offer web, email and DNS for all public facing websites over IPv6. While not all government websites will hit the deadline, according to Akamai at least 2,000 of them will. According to at least one expert, the IPv6 mandate is proof that top-down cheerleading for tech innovation works. 'The 2012 IPv6 mandate is not the first (or the last) IPv6 transition mandate from the U.S. government. Four years ago, in 2008, the U.S. government also had an IPv6 mandate in place. That particular mandate, required U.S. Government agencies to have IPv6-ready equipment enabled in their infrastructure.'"
Re:And on Monday, the headline will be (Score:5, Informative)
Why would a publicly-facing web server be behind NAT? That doesn't make any sense. NAT offers no security benefits.
Please note that "NAT" != "stateful firewall", though the two functions are often combined in a single piece of hardware.
My home network has been dual-stack for years (with NATed IPv4 and IPv6). All the systems on the network are behind a stateful firewall and even though my internal devices have globally-unique IPv6 addresses none of them are accessible from the outside world.
Re:Too Complicated (Score:5, Informative)
IPv6 is simpler than IPv4.
That's just a lame excuse. There are some new features, but those are mainly important to the endpoints. For routers in between, the job they need to do became simpler. And it is the network, which has been lacking, not the endpoints. The excuse that it is too complicated has mainly been used by those who didn't need to deal with the complexity.
Name one change that affected a network provider, who just has to move packets between two endpoints.
No. There were only two approaches that could have speeded it up. Top down regulation or customer demand. But both of those were in the hands of people who won't understand the problem until they can no longer get online. Actually, there is one other thing that could have speeded it up. If we had never gotten any sort of NAT for IPv4 in the first place, then the transition would have gone faster.
Re:And on Monday, the headline will be (Score:5, Informative)
I can't tell if you're a troll or just spouting off about things you don't understand in the least, but...
It's a hell of a lot easier to find a vulnerable machine behind NAT than it is to find one across a search space 40 bits wide (which is wider than the entire IPv4 search space, and less than a cube root of the search space of IPv6 as a protocol).
NAT is not a security measure. You can (and should) still have a firewall with IPv6; your firewall box just won't also have to perform NAT. That's fine, though; a NAT has a maximum search space of 24 bits (10.0.0.0/8) while IPv6 has enough addresses to assign one to every atom in the solar system, and no, that's no an exaggeration, guess, or line of BS.
This time it really is happenning (Score:5, Informative)
I work for the NSP for a large number of government research facilities. Our network has had full IPv6 support for several years, but no IPv6 customers (other than ourselves). The prior IPv6 mandate was primarily satisfied by bring up an IPv6 connection with the customer and their pinging our router, then deconfiguring the IPv6. That was really all the mandate required.
This time we are bringing up full IPv6 connectivity with them. It really is happening this time and it mostly seems to be working.
The mandate is also pressing other providers to get IPv6 up and running. Under the mandate, if you have a provider that can't support IPv6 on Oct. 1, you need to change providers. In simple terms, the general public must be able to access your web services and all publicly linked pages as well as DNS via IPv6 if they have IPv6 connectivity to the Internet. (Admittedly, this is a fairly small subset of Internet users.) The federal governments is a rather large customer of several major providers, so this has probably been the biggest cause of several of them getting IPv6 running, though some still don't offer IPv6 to non-governmental customers.
Between the U.S. Government and Comcast, IPv6 seems to really be happening. Traffic is clearly increasing rapidly, though still very tiny compared to IPv4.