Pulling the IPv4 Plug

Just as a little experiment tonight I disabled my IPv4 stack on Vista and went entirely IPv6 native (no tunneling). Of course I got what I expected, a completly unusable system.

What worked:

  • Windows domain and Exchange - Thanks to recent upgrade of our company to Server 2008 and Exchange 2007 everything worked internally. File sharing, DNS, authentication…​all worked like a charm.

  • ipv6.google.com - Loaded right up and I was able to search. Also if you edit your host file and add a record for mail.google.com pointing to 2001:4860:0:2001::68 (at least for right now) you can access Gmail. I’m pretty sure that this works for MAPS and DOCS. Doesn’t work for TALK however.

  • www.arin.net - For all your IPv4/IPv6 needs…​at least until they run out.

  • www.kame.net - Love to see that turtle dance.

What didn’t work:

  • Basically everything else.

If IPv4 is going to run out in 2-3 years, the content providers have a long way to go.

Cody Lerum - October 30, 2008

Windows Vista DHCPv6 Issues

While working through an internal deployment at the company where I work something pecurlier started to happen when we lit up an IPv6 DHCP service.

What happened was the DHCP client on Vista had trouble parsing the DNS Suffix Search List which was sent by the DHCP server. The DNS suffix of corp.company.com was sent but the OS showed

DNS Suffix Search List:
corp
company
com

So, instead of searching on corp.company.com it tried each of them in succession — first com, then company, then corp.

I sent an email to Sean Siler who is the Microsoft IPv6 program manager (IPv6 Blog) and he has confirmed that this is a known bug which will be fixed in SP2…​possibly sooner.

I have confirmed this is fixed in the latest SP2 Beta (10/29/08)

Cody Lerum - October 10, 2008
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Cody Lerum
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