[AusNOG] IPv6 is hard.

[Paul Brooks]

On 3/07/2012 5:31 PM, Tom Lanyon wrote:

Tom - thank you for the 'ground truth' of your experiences. You may have just flagged
yourself for an AusNOG conference talk!

>
> Since then, we've fought against software after software trying to get them working in IPv6-only-land.  Many just don't have support for listening on IPv6 sockets, many explicitly try to connect to IPv4 literal addresses (e.g. don't use DNS so can't make use of DNS64) and many simply don't support connecting to any IPv6 sockets (e.g. use of AF_INET explicitly).  Don't get me started on big IPv6-proponents like Cisco not eating their own dog food (Cisco UCS server infrastructure only supports IPv4 for all of the management interfaces being one example).  It's not practical to need to build "cutting-edge" (read: not vendor supported) versions of every piece of software just to get basic functionality on IPv6.
>
> So that was in data centre land.  We also performed a small test releasing IPv6 to a workstation network and removing IPv4 connectivity from those hosts.  Most standard apps (e.g. email, web browsing) worked fine, however some people were unable to connect to our internal Jabber/XMPP server (which uses DNS SRV records) and some apps like Dropbox on OS X appeared to stop functioning without IPv4 connectivity.
Have you submitted bug reports to the open-source groups and proprietary system
vendors (e.g. Dropbox) ? Hopefully these apps can be improved, but it will only happen
if enough people flag 'this doesn't work'

P.