Kyle Brantley: September 2008 Archives
A protocol is nothing if never used. Well, okay, maybe it can be a joke. Maybe. Okay, so that's not really a protocol. Evil Bit jokes are still positive net karma, right?
Likewise, IPv6 is pretty much useless if it is never used. I can assign the addresses all I please but ultimately if all I do is ping my desktop that sits "behind NAT" with it then for the most part the effort was wasted.
My server runs CentOS 5.2, my desktop runs Gentoo, my laptop Debian, my router Debian, my windows desktop Vista (dual boot Server 2008), and the Vista box also has three instances of OpenBSD running within VMWare.
I've got a pretty good testbed to see just what does/doesn't support IPv6, in terms of everything general web browsing to random system daemons to whatever end user programs you have a desire to run. So, I put together a small bit of info concerning what handles IPv6 perfectly, what is kind of broken, and what just looks at it with a mystified look on its face.
So to start:
Operating Systems
Windows
As far as I know, the first IPv6 stack was available for Windows 2000 via a separate download. XP bundled it by default, but left it uninstalled. Vista has the IPv6 stack enabled by default.
Linux
Got a pretty new IPv6 stack with 2.6. Had a working stack in 2.4. I'm pretty sure 2.2 had a functional stack too, as did 2.0. Don't quote me on that.
OpenBSD
Has supported IPv6 since 2.7.
Services/Servers
Apache
Apache has support IPv6 ever since the 2.0 release. Every component of apache that I tested supported IPv6 just fine, from general web page serving to SSL to proxies. Considering how much of the web is still on 1.3, all of those hosts will have to be upgraded to 2.0+ before a much wider IPv6 web base is available.
IIS
IIS (the Microsoft webserver) has supported IPv6 from their 6.0 release, also known as Server 2003. Most places use at least 2003 on their servers, the era of Win2k webservers kind of died out with Code Red and all of those other worms.
MySQL
Just kind of sits and looks at IPv6 like it has no clue what it is. Which is actually entirely true. Boo.
PostgreSQL
Talks happily with IPv6. At least I think. I'm too lazy to start my local copy and check. Their page on the matter isn't what one would call descriptive. No clue when this support was added.
MSSQL
Supported since their 2005 release.
Oracle
Offically supported as of 2006.
Samba
Supported as of the 3.2 release, which was actually just on June 1st of this year.
Windows SMB/CIFS
Supported with XP and onward. Probably Win2000 too.
So the servers are looking pretty good. Unless you run MySQL, which is pretty much everyone. Boo.
At a minimum, we can serve any content over HTTP just fine, and we can access most database just fine too, unless your name starts with a "My" and ends with a "SQL."
End-user programs
Mozilla Suite (and Firefox, Thunderbird, Seamonkey and friends)
Native IPv6 support, ever since the year 2000. Still has some work to be done according to the meta bug, but pretty much all of those bugs are on random operating systems that don't adversely change your ability to connect to IPv6 enabled sites.
Internet Explorer
Supported IPv6 ever since 4.0, once you applied a patch from their research division. Likewise real native support was probably with 5.0, if not it was by 6.0.
Outlook
Supported as of Outlook 2007.
Kopete
Supported. The KDE project has traces of IPv6 development starting around 1999. As far as I can tell, IPv6 is natively supported in every program in 3.5.
Pidgin
Supported. Not clue as of when due to the GAIM --> Pidgin name change, and I'm far too lazy to figure that out.
MSN Messenger, AIM, ICQ and friends
Who cares? (Likely not supported, though I doubt the client is the blocker in these cases.)
PuTTY
Supported since '04.
OpenSSH(d)
Supported. Probably since forever. Go OpenSSH.
irssi
Supported!
mIRC
Not supported without loading a third-party DLL. mIRC sucks anyway.
X-Chat
Supported.... on Windows since '03, *nix and friends likely even earlier.
I could go on and on and on. I won't, because I have no desire to list hundreds of thousands of software packages and their relative IPv6 states. Plus I'm getting tired and this entire post was spontaneous. Not too bad for 30 minutes of google.
But for the most part, we've got a great picture. Every operating system, browser, and web server supports IPv6 and supports it fantastically well. Nearly every program on *nix supports IPv6 and has for quite some time, and most of the big name Windows programs support IPv6 as well.
Not mentioned here was DNS, but the protocol has had support for it since (just about) forever and now that we have AAAA records for the root servers in the public DNS, DNS is good to go with IPv6 from start to finish.
Now we just have to work on the ISPs and home grade routers...
Footnote: one of the comments I got on my initial IPv6 entry was someone reporting success in integrating their LAN with IPv6. While I'm glad to hear it, I'm even more glad that when I got the "unapproved comment has been posted" notification e-mail, the corresponding IP address was a v6 address. The second I had IPv6 up and running on my server, I threw in AAAA records for pretty much everything. If I had to guess, they didn't even know they were using IPv6 to view this blog and post the comment - which is exactly the goal.
Likewise, IPv6 is pretty much useless if it is never used. I can assign the addresses all I please but ultimately if all I do is ping my desktop that sits "behind NAT" with it then for the most part the effort was wasted.
My server runs CentOS 5.2, my desktop runs Gentoo, my laptop Debian, my router Debian, my windows desktop Vista (dual boot Server 2008), and the Vista box also has three instances of OpenBSD running within VMWare.
I've got a pretty good testbed to see just what does/doesn't support IPv6, in terms of everything general web browsing to random system daemons to whatever end user programs you have a desire to run. So, I put together a small bit of info concerning what handles IPv6 perfectly, what is kind of broken, and what just looks at it with a mystified look on its face.
So to start:
Operating Systems
Windows
As far as I know, the first IPv6 stack was available for Windows 2000 via a separate download. XP bundled it by default, but left it uninstalled. Vista has the IPv6 stack enabled by default.
Linux
Got a pretty new IPv6 stack with 2.6. Had a working stack in 2.4. I'm pretty sure 2.2 had a functional stack too, as did 2.0. Don't quote me on that.
OpenBSD
Has supported IPv6 since 2.7.
Services/Servers
Apache
Apache has support IPv6 ever since the 2.0 release. Every component of apache that I tested supported IPv6 just fine, from general web page serving to SSL to proxies. Considering how much of the web is still on 1.3, all of those hosts will have to be upgraded to 2.0+ before a much wider IPv6 web base is available.
IIS
IIS (the Microsoft webserver) has supported IPv6 from their 6.0 release, also known as Server 2003. Most places use at least 2003 on their servers, the era of Win2k webservers kind of died out with Code Red and all of those other worms.
MySQL
Just kind of sits and looks at IPv6 like it has no clue what it is. Which is actually entirely true. Boo.
PostgreSQL
Talks happily with IPv6. At least I think. I'm too lazy to start my local copy and check. Their page on the matter isn't what one would call descriptive. No clue when this support was added.
MSSQL
Supported since their 2005 release.
Oracle
Offically supported as of 2006.
Samba
Supported as of the 3.2 release, which was actually just on June 1st of this year.
Windows SMB/CIFS
Supported with XP and onward. Probably Win2000 too.
So the servers are looking pretty good. Unless you run MySQL, which is pretty much everyone. Boo.
At a minimum, we can serve any content over HTTP just fine, and we can access most database just fine too, unless your name starts with a "My" and ends with a "SQL."
End-user programs
Mozilla Suite (and Firefox, Thunderbird, Seamonkey and friends)
Native IPv6 support, ever since the year 2000. Still has some work to be done according to the meta bug, but pretty much all of those bugs are on random operating systems that don't adversely change your ability to connect to IPv6 enabled sites.
Internet Explorer
Supported IPv6 ever since 4.0, once you applied a patch from their research division. Likewise real native support was probably with 5.0, if not it was by 6.0.
Outlook
Supported as of Outlook 2007.
Kopete
Supported. The KDE project has traces of IPv6 development starting around 1999. As far as I can tell, IPv6 is natively supported in every program in 3.5.
Pidgin
Supported. Not clue as of when due to the GAIM --> Pidgin name change, and I'm far too lazy to figure that out.
MSN Messenger, AIM, ICQ and friends
Who cares? (Likely not supported, though I doubt the client is the blocker in these cases.)
PuTTY
Supported since '04.
OpenSSH(d)
Supported. Probably since forever. Go OpenSSH.
irssi
Supported!
mIRC
Not supported without loading a third-party DLL. mIRC sucks anyway.
X-Chat
Supported.... on Windows since '03, *nix and friends likely even earlier.
I could go on and on and on. I won't, because I have no desire to list hundreds of thousands of software packages and their relative IPv6 states. Plus I'm getting tired and this entire post was spontaneous. Not too bad for 30 minutes of google.
But for the most part, we've got a great picture. Every operating system, browser, and web server supports IPv6 and supports it fantastically well. Nearly every program on *nix supports IPv6 and has for quite some time, and most of the big name Windows programs support IPv6 as well.
Not mentioned here was DNS, but the protocol has had support for it since (just about) forever and now that we have AAAA records for the root servers in the public DNS, DNS is good to go with IPv6 from start to finish.
Now we just have to work on the ISPs and home grade routers...
Footnote: one of the comments I got on my initial IPv6 entry was someone reporting success in integrating their LAN with IPv6. While I'm glad to hear it, I'm even more glad that when I got the "unapproved comment has been posted" notification e-mail, the corresponding IP address was a v6 address. The second I had IPv6 up and running on my server, I threw in AAAA records for pretty much everything. If I had to guess, they didn't even know they were using IPv6 to view this blog and post the comment - which is exactly the goal.
