Folks,
First I think the
consensus for dual stack is clearly making head way finally in and out of the
IETF.
But here is a real
operational scenario for us I am working on right now.
User believe IPv6
is important and they want to deploy. The need to worry about all the
things we discuss here but there is another one. When do they tell their
suppliers they MUST support IPv6 and how does this work? And when does
IPv6 get turned on?
The good thing
about a dual stack approach is these users can mandate all suppliers must
support the dual IPv6/IPv4 stack for procurement at some specified point in
time. But they will most likely have to run IPv4 intiially on those procured
boxes until the v6ops type parts are figured out and applications are
ported.
Now to the
technical issue.
How are the apps
ported and at what point on the suppliers boxes?
Using IPv4-Mapped
addresses in the base API an app could port to IPv6 and take IPv6 addresses
and IPv4Mapped addresses from getaddrinfo() (old gethostbyname() for those
that don't know getaddrinfo() yet) and pass down IPv4-Mapped addresses to a
dual stack implementation and they will be put out over the network as IPv4 by
a dual stack node, but to the application layer they are just doing
IPv6.
This will be part
of the deployment recommendations from vendors, consultants, and systems
integrators for users and some users will figure this out on their own and
large application software providers that only want to release one binary for
both IPv4 and IPv6.
I am not sure if
we should put this into any docs for v6ops or not? It could be viewed as
implementation deployment effort and issue not a standars issue? But it should
be part of our emerging scenarios is my belief currently (all of
them)?
Comments.
Regards,
/jim