title: A pox on both your houses: ipv6 and default network configs link: https://onemoretech.wordpress.com/2009/01/28/a-pox-on-both-your-houses-ipv6-and-default-network-configs/ author: lembobro description: post_id: 391 created: 2009/01/28 15:18:20 created_gmt: 2009/01/28 15:18:20 comment_status: open post_name: a-pox-on-both-your-houses-ipv6-and-default-network-configs status: publish post_type: post

A pox on both your houses: ipv6 and default network configs

My former colleague, Mike Radonis, recently ranted to me about how annoying it is to have IPV6 configured in Ubuntu networking on a fresh install. Mike’s another convert to open source from the Microsoft world like me, and has been running Ubuntu as his distro of choice for some time (in fact he’s the one who convinced me to switch over to Ubuntu). On the IPV6 thing he is, as usual, entirely right. It really makes no sense to configure IPV6 by default on a server or even a desktop when almost no one has access to an IPV6 network. I say “almost” because there are those in academia and government like my youngest brother, the real Dr. Lembo, who’s connected to Internet 2 both at work and home (not sure about home right now, I know he had it when he was up at Cornell a couple of years ago).

Which gets me to my rant. It’s bad enough, as Mike complains, that we have to remove all vestiges of the IPV6 config on every new install, but the performance hit you take on an IPV4 network from having it there only adds insult to injury. If someone wants to shut both Mike and I up the answer is simple:

give us IPV6 too.

Before anyone flies off the handle and starts going on about how much it would cost to roll out IPV6 to the entire country, even though this is clearly going to have to be part of the mass broadband deployment that our new President promised during the campaign, I’m not talking here about giving IPV6 to the whole country.

Just give it to me and Mike. We’ll even promise to keep quiet about it. Last thing I want is the security operations guy who lives next door to know I’ve got an Internet 2 connection, after all.

There’s some video over on C-SPAN that highlight the serious discussions of next generation broadband as part of a major government investment in our national infrastructure. One in particular is this presentation at the New America Foundation. The direct video links to C-SPAN’s archives are: Part I and Part II. There are additional resources over on the NAF Wireless Future page covering the same subject. Of course none of the video is viewable on a Linux machine, since C-SPAN, like BBC, has implemented a Windows-centric configuration for it’s Flash-based media player (one wonders at that — even MSNBC seems to be able to deliver cross-platform video nowadays).

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