Well, I missed the month mark, but I guess I'll do the news thing.

It was an exciting news weekend. Synopsis, I'm single again, had to go to a funeral (not the same person), and an ex-girlfriend got married (again, not the same person). I'm not going to go into detail on any of that.

Technology wise, the big thing that I did lately was to implement IPv6 at home. I've been wanting to do this for quite a while, but I finally got around to it when I got ahold of a Cisco 2600, and set it up to run dual stack IPv4 and IPv6 at home.

IPv6 is cool. The big thing that IPv6 offers in my mind is end-to-end addressability of all devices on the Internet. Meaning, if desired, it could offer an end of NAT. The obvious advantage to this is no longer having to maintain things like port forwarding rules. If you want to SSH to your home Linux box, you can do so without having to port forward port 22 to your Linux box. Not to mention that you can SSH directly to any box at your house, using port 22 (as opposed to port forwarding a non-standard port for each box). It's the way the Internet was designed to work.

Many have decried IPv6 has not being a reasonable alternative to the IPv4 we use everyday. Probably one of the more concisely worded criticisms is the IPv6 mess by DJB. DJB's main criticism is that the transition to IPv6 will be difficult because many groups and companies have not set up IPv6 addresses for their servers and are probably unlikely to do so. Therefore, during a transition period, it's possible that your IPv6-only enabled box might not be able to communicate with an IPv4-only enabled server.

I think that excuse is a cop out. IPv6 is already here and enabled in many operating systems, and all major routers (excluding SOHO routers) are ready as well. What is takes is customer demand to push this forward. This is happening in a limited fashion with the government decree that their agencies be IPv6 capable. While DJB does identify some issues related to full blown switchover, there is no reason many can't start using IPv6 in a dual stack fashion right now.

To me it sounds like the case made against IPv6 is the same one people used 10 years ago to justify not running Linux: "No one is running it, so it doesn't make sense for us to do so." This is exactly the type of herd-think that stifles innovation. For those who have the skills, instead of bitching about IPv6, how about taking into account that the hard work is already done in the fact that the difficult to replace infrastructure is already there. So lets work on the weak spots and get this going!