[Oneiric topic] IPv6

[Clint Byrum]

Excerpts from Etienne Goyer's message of Mon Apr 18 14:03:12 -0700 2011:
> Hello everyone,
> 
> I have been having one-on-one conversation in the past few weeks with a
> number of people around the question of IPv6 in Ubuntu.  With the
> upcoming IPv4 armageddon, I think it is quite pressing that we make sure
> that we have good end-to-end IPv6 support in Ubuntu.  I've been asked to
> kickstart a discussion about it, and eventually distil the results in a
> blueprint for the next UDS.
> 
> So, here are my notes on the stuff that would need to be investigated:
> 
> 
> - Installer support: some work has been done upstream in netcfg and
> d-i[1].  Not sure about the status.  I do not think Ubiquity has any
> IPv6 support (or does it?)
> 
> - NFS: I was never able to make that work in Ubuntu.  Reportedly, it
> requires nfs-utils 1.2.3, which just got uploaded to Debian.  I also
> believe nfs-utils needs to be built with --enable-ipv6.
> 
> - DHCPv6: I understand we are getting that in Natty with isc-dhcp v4.  I
> know SLAAC is the way to go in most case, but some people wants/needs
> DHCPv6 for various reasons.  I guess it mostly needs testing.
> 
> - NetworkManager: It used to be that NetworkManager insisted upon
> getting an IPv4 address, but Matt Trudel just marked bug #307598 as
> fixed two weeks ago.  Presumably, NM now work fine in IPv6-only network,
> but I have not tested yet.
> 
> 
> Any other major roadblock beside the above?  I am going to sift through
> the bugs tagged ipv6 on Launchpad, but if there's anything obvious I
> missed, please let me know.

I think the most important bit is going to be automated testing of common
use cases.

We need to be able to fire up a VM on an IPv6 only subnet, install LAMP,
give it an IPv6 address, have it send an email to an IPv6 enabled MX,
have it trigger an IPv6 client to pull a page from it, then start Firefox,
and have it run through some automated scripts (Selenium anybody?) to
drive an IPv6 website.

> 
> Finally, a question to consider is whether we want to address the
> IPv6-only use-case (ie, not dual-stack, no IPv4 configuration).  This
> has some implications, notably around d-i and NetworkManager.  Few
> networks are IPv6-only at this time, but it's bound to change in the
> near future.

Given the IPv4 space exhaustion problem, we can reasonably expect to see
it all used up by 2019, which is when the presumably-next-LTS 12.04
will reach EOL on the server. So I think IPv6 only networks are a simple
goal that will definitely become a reality in the lifetime of upcoming
releases.