ecently, I’ve been writing a lot about IPv6, the next generation of the Internet Protocol that makes the Internet and most home and business networks go. Now, like it or lump it, we, starting with our businesses and mobile devices and eventually our home networks, are all going to have to move to IPv6.
That is going to be a major pain, especially for network administrators, but as I’ve been working more with IPv6 I’ve discovered other problems. A lot of network equipment out there can’t actually handle IPv6.
Oh, the vendors may say that it supports IPv6, but the truth is another matter. I’m not going to name names because I’ve been finding this during the course of upgrading my own network infrastructure to IPv6 instead of in a lab. If I had access to a real lab I could spend the time needed to make sure of my conclusions and explain exactly what’s happening.
What I can say though is that there’s a lot of hardware network incompatibilties out there. In the course of using both enterprise and SOHO (small office-home-office) equipment I found that even devices from the same vendor sometimes couldn’t connect using IPv6 with each other. This is not good.