Military Pressuring Vendors On IPv6

netbuzz writes "US military officials are threatening IT suppliers with the loss of military business if they don't use their own wares to start deploying IPv6 on their corporate networks and public-facing Web services immediately. 'We are pressing our vendors in any way we can,' says Ron Broersma, DREN Chief Engineer and a Network Security Manager for the Navy's Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command. 'We are competing one off against another. If they want to sell to us, we're asking them: Are you using IPv6 features in your own products on your corporate networks? Is your public Web site IPv6 enabled? We've been doing this to all of the vendors.'"

Adding IPv6 is not difficult

[The_Dougster]

I upgraded my systems to ipv6 even though I just have IPv4 by signing up for a free tunnel broker service. I recommend SixXS [sixxs.net] if you are serious, or one of the others if you just want to flirt around with IPv6. Basically, you open a tunnel on one of the machines, it starts radvd which activates ipv6 on every machine on your LAN automagically, and thats all you do. Perhaps edit a config file here or there to turn on ipv6 if its lacking for some reason. The radvd machine broadcasts on your net and provides something like DHCP for all your ipv6 enabled machines which usually just pick it up on the fly with no reboot or anything required.

Re:Too little, too late...

[bkk_diesel]

The more "IPv6 aware" clients turn it off to avoid compatibility issues.

Interestingly, a google search for "how to turn on ipv6" [google.com] has the first three results instructing me how to turn OFF IPv6, which seems to bolster your argument.

Re:Well

[caerwyn]

Actually, it really depends on the company you're looking at. One of the biggest problems isn't so much the $2000 hammer, but the "not invented here" syndrome that causes it.

The government, and DoD especially, does procurement and research based on contracts. The problem is that the results of contract A are not well shared with the contractor for follow-on contract B- which means that they end up reinventing the wheel, and doing all the same work that A did, just to work on the problem that B was supposed to handle.

Hence, many of the companies that do the work are, in isolation, especially the smaller ones, reasonably efficient. But the system as a *whole* is horribly inefficient, and the *big* companies that are involved in this whole thing can rake in huge profits and support huge bureaucracies in the process, so they have a vested interested in lobbying for the status quo.

Re:Well

[SuricouRaven]

One better, actually: Auto-allocated addresses include the host's MAC address. Get someone's IPv6 address, and you can figure out roughly what motherboard or network card they have - and if you can sieze their computer, confirm if that computer actually has that MAC. Some OEMs might even keep MAC-to-Customer-Address databases.

All this assuming that the user doesn't just fake their MAC address of course, which is trivial.