Subject: RE: newbie question

From: "Jeroen Massar" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 2 Nov 2001 00:48:06 +0100

Thomas Scholz [mailto:[email-masked]] wrote:

> Microsoft IPv6 stack is pretty feature lacking. I works, but they
still
> haven't made IIS or any other program compatible with IPv6. 
Stack != software

IIS is a _program_ and has nothing to do with the stack although it uses
it's _API_ to communicate over IPv6... (I didn't see IIS on *BSD yet for
example :)

And just like all those *nix programs.... they'll have to be
patched/updated to support IPv6...

Apache 1.3.x doesn't support IPv6 natively either (unless you apply the
patch from the nice KAME peoples :)
Apache 2.x does... and so will IIS 7 or something in the future... well
that's quite possible at least...

IPv6 is still in a development fase... and soon all stacks (KAME, USAGI,
MS, Solaris.... etc...) will all be ready for production.
Some people (among me :) use it for production already though even the
MS stack... and actually I don't have any problems with it whatsoever.
That most windows applications are closed source and those people need
to get paid for adding features and the fact that IPv6 isn't deployed
everywhere (yet :)
simply doesn't 'push' those programmers to implement IPv6
compatibility... even though MS have made it quite easy to do so...

So windows programmers check out: http://www.microsoft.com/ipv6/ and
especially
http://www.microsoft.com/windows2000/technologies/communications/ipv6/ip
v6winsok.asp  and go IPv6-enable those applications...

If you want an example of a nice IPv6 ported application and how it
fixes the IPv6 check:
http://cvs.tartarus.org/putty/winnet.c?annotate=1.8 which shows the
patch for PuTTY...
Please note that when a host has both an IPv6 and a IPv4 addy and IPv6
is down you currently have to use the IPv4 address... I'll have to fix
that one day...

> And they have removed numricc URLs in XP, now you can only call AAAA 
> records. But if a AAAA record is found, it tries it before the A
record.
You mean that they removed numberic URL's in wininet.dll .... :)

> XP's new stack has some enhancements over the one 2000 is using. They
have
> made it possible to view connection with netstat, and a few more
> configuration options.
>
> But still, they are a long way from completing it.
Depends on which part you look at.... the stack is only 'missing' things
like mobility but most other stacks around don't have full support for
that yet either.
The software part is a kinda worse as I describe above... but that will
come in the future... as businesses and thus the programmers get asked
for
IPv6 support by the people who buy their software... ... ah I am
repeating myself :)

Greets,
 Jeroen

--------------------------------------------------------------------
IETF IPng Working Group Mailing List
IPng Home Page:                      http://playground.sun.com/ipng
FTP archive:                      ftp://playground.sun.com/pub/ipng
Direct all administrative requests to [email-masked]
--------------------------------------------------------------------

---

From: "Brian Zill" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 2 Nov 2001 10:37:43 -0800

Yes, there seems to be some confusion here between the "stack" and
things that run over it.  Although I suppose this distinction is
probably more important to those of us who worked on it than it is to
the average end user.

The IPv6 stack currently shipping in Windows XP is primarily intended
for developers and trial network deployments.  The new getadrinfo and
getnameinfo APIs are supported for use with IPv6 and IPv4, so developers
can write their programs to be protocol agnostic.  Additionally, other
APIs (like GetAdaptersAddresses) are now IPv6-aware.  We'd like to
encourage independent developers to port their applications to support
IPv6.

As other people have pointed out, many of the network utilities (e.g.
telnet, ftp) that are included with Windows XP are IPv6-enabled.  A
number of people had been asking for netstat support, and that's there
now.  Netsh can be used for configuration, the hosts file can contain
IPv6 addresses, etc.  And IE 6 (really wininet as Jeroen points out) now
supports native IPv6 web browsing.

One thing that I haven't seen mentioned yet is RPC.  RPC is IPv6-enabled
in XP, so any applications that run over RPC can use IPv6 between XP
machines.

Most of the other things people are asking for here (like IIS, file
sharing, DNS over v6 transport, Windows Media Services, etc) are being
worked on.  I've used working prototypes for several of these.  I don't
want to disappoint anyone by promising any specific release dates
though.

The FAQ for IPv6 on Windows XP can be found at
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/pro/techinfo/administration/ipv6/defa
ult.asp

And more info about our IPv6 plans can be found at
http://www.microsoft.com/ipv6

Thanks,
--Brian