IPv6 Pain Experiment

Thu Oct 3 20:13:52 UTC 2019

> On 4 Oct 2019, at 4:35 am, Seth Mattinen <sethm at rollernet.us> wrote:
> 
> On 10/2/19 15:03, Naslund, Steve wrote:
>> In my experience, the biggest hurdle to installing a pure IPv6 has nothing to do with network gear or network engineers.  That stuff I expect to support v6.  This biggest hurdle is the dumb stuff like machinery interfaces, surveillance devices, the must have IP interface on such and such of an obsolete appliance, etc.  The dumb legacy app that supports the ancient obsolete pen plotter that we must keep forever, etc.
> 
> 
> Using the plotter example, why is it obsolete and must be replaced if it still works? It's a waste of money to dump fully functional hardware because software. The argument to justify its replacement needs to be something along the lines of the new plotter will output faster and save X hours a day which is equal to Y hours of time over a year. Not that the new one supports IPv6 and yeah that's about it. Oh the new one also supports TLSv1.3 to make sure your plots can't be intercepted by your cube neighbor as you walk across the office.

Firstly adding IPv6 doesn’t remove IPv4.

The plotter is one piece of legacy gear that almost certainly doesn’t need to be reached from the other side of the planet and even when the core is IPv6-only, it can still be reached via NAT64 or IPv4 tunnels.  Yes, your home router will likely get a check box on its static DHCP page saying NAT64 this entry and many be even add a DDNS entry for it as well.  I’m pretty sure I could configure a LEDE (OpenWRT) box to do this today.

Throw a Raspberry Pi (or similar) in front of the plotter (or even the whole shop floor) with NAT64 configured and it is now IPv6 capable.

Mark
-- 
Mark Andrews, ISC
1 Seymour St., Dundas Valley, NSW 2117, Australia
PHONE: +61 2 9871 4742              INTERNET: marka at isc.org