Ars Technica on IPv4 exhaustion

Wed Jun 18 23:26:35 UTC 2014

On Wed, 2014-06-18 at 19:02 -0400, George, Wes wrote:
> Similarly, Belkin’s home routers appear to support IPv6, but that doesn’t
> appear in the specs or features list on their site when I just checked it.

There's also an issue of what "IPv6 support" actually means. A few years
ago it meant "has IPv6 printed on the box" :-) Now it means - what?

For wireless or IPv4 support in such devices, the whole side of the box
is covered with RFC numbers and protocol names (or the marketing names
thereof). Even RIP gets a mention! But on the matter of what exactly the
IPv6 support is, the box is often silent or very terse. Which makes
buying a home device for use in an IPv6 environment very tricky -
essentially you have to either spend hours researching, or you have to
make sure the store will accept the product back if it doesn't work as
you need it to. Someone who knows exactly what they are talking about
can ask e.g., "does it support DHCPv6-PD?", but that's effectively
impossible for most people - they can't articulate the actual features
needed, they just want it to "just work".

Sigh, one of many barriers still to fall...

Regards, K.

-- 
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Karl Auer (kauer at biplane.com.au)
http://www.biplane.com.au/kauer
http://twitter.com/kauer389

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