On Jun 6, 2011, at 4:14 PM, Cameron Byrne wrote: Hi, I wrote that reply the hour your email came in, but didn't want to send this out earlier to not distract people too much.

FreeBSD is initiating IPv6-only validation work

I think that's a less scary topic to some readers so I put it into subject. I hope you don't mind.

http://www.prweb.com/releases/2011/6/prweb8529718.htm

My own testing of the Windows 7 shows that, at it's core, it works well as IPv6-only for most "web & email" functions. Layering on applications like Skype, things start to fall apart.

Well, that really depends on what you are doing and targeting. I have seen plugins crash a browser if there was no IPv4 anymore, I have seen timekeeping software to log me an error every few minutes, I have seen "v6ready certified" multifunction devices to force me to pretend to print before being able to scan, I have seen content scanners falling over, network monitoring tools, web servers not being ready, yadda yadda yadda. I have seen a lot of confusing error messages when v4 was tried after v6 and that hid the actual error messages making debugging a hell. As an open source person, for example, I could imagine to see every out of the almost 300k open source projects sf.net is hosting and which do networking to eventually just work .. well say the more common ones of them. I'd love to see soooo much perl stuff to just work with IPv6, I'd love software updates of my backup software, that worked well without IPv4, not to break because the new major version *oops* is still missing parts of the IPv6 code, jdk to not trouble anymore, .... It's the software that runs in enterprises, SMBs, at ISPs, that is used with the little tools that if failing put you into blind flying and ruin your week, ... I have spent some good time the last 6 months chasing some of these things and not unsurprisingly some other things worked fairly great out of the box. But I also have a list of things to fix still and I am sure we'll find more the more people are actually looking. Note well -- this is different to "just no IPv4 address" which still allows you to still do certain things on AF_INET sockets. This is returning "Protocol not supported" in that case instead and that really triggers another series of problems. Also note well that all these things worked in dual-stack (almost) flawlessly and we don't want to motivate end users to go IPv6-only at this point (the much fun it would be;). It's you people who'll force them to eventually. It's embedded folks that want it already in addition to your mobile world. Once you stop targeting the top-100 websites and what your parents or children do and forget about that single voice/chat/file sharing program, but look at things that run the world these days it's getting more interesting;-) I am sure we'll get there, as we are trying to get users and content onto dual-stack currently, but I don't want us to be there in only another 15 years. Thus starting early, as you and others have done, is the key. Given the huge number of FreeBSD based things that ``run the Internet'', and unsurprisingly end users, I hope that it'll help the commercial vendors, protocol developers, app writers, QA, ... as well to have their or rather your gear, the daemons, upper layer protocols, etc. working flawlessly w/o legacy-IP for when the time comes that others want to reduce mgmt costs and complexity and be able to say "no inet4" as well. This is the beginning of the journey, and we'll hopefully continue to head straight into the direction of "done, just works" to be able to tick that checkbox off soon;) Regards, Bjoern -- A lot of the this June 8th World IPv6 Day verbiage was about picking the right color, not so much for the bikeshed of finally putting IPv6 into use, but it was hopefully a redpill day for some bluepill people. /bz