Feds Adopt IPv6 by June 2008?

I read OMB: IPv6 by June 2008 today, which says:

"The federal government will transition to IP Version 6 (IPv6) by June 2008, said Karen Evans, the Office of Management and Budget’s administrator of e-government and information technology.

'Once the network backbones are ready, the applications and other elements will follow,' she said today while testifying before the House Government Reform Committee."

Riiight. Be prepared to see this slip to, oh, maybe never. The Federal government is also supposed to be securing its systems, and its report card is still lousy. Agencies have also known since Homeland Security Presidential Directive 12 (Aug 04) that they needed to implement smart cards, but problems are anticipated in meeting the deadlines.

Marcus Ranum pointed me towards a talk by Bill Cheswick (.ppt) on IPv6 transition realities. It mentions several problems that might prevent IPv6 adoption, like unreasonable demands on routers, hosts which can pick a new IPv6 address for every connection, and other issues.

Comments

Anonymous said…
Nanog subscriber, right ? ;)

The mailing list thread about $subj seems to have no end in sight, but slashdot did not accept any postings about it ...
Anonymous said…
With all due respect, I think you're wrong about IPv6 adoption never happening. I suggest you take a look at the congressional committee hearing of the 29th:

http://reform.house.gov/GovReform/Schedule/EventSingle.aspx?EventID=29305

I think it only takes a little imagination to think of scads of uses of the Internet that are impossible today because of the limitations of IPv4 address space and the poor topology of our IPv4 internet, mostly thanks to NAT. Honestly, IPv6 is going to be widely deployed whether North America wants it or not, so we'd better play along instead of being left behind.
Anonymous said…
I don't really see how the US has much choice in the matter. I agree with the above poster that the US needs to get moving or get left behind. China and others are on their way. Besides, all modern OSs support IPv6 and a lot of recent network devices do too.

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