[patrickgzill]

IPv6 is such a mess that the DoD needs to ensure that when IPv6 is claimed as "supported" by a vendor, that it actually does work. There are plenty of bugs, corner cases, and limitations in what vendors are offering.

This "strong-arming" is not that much different than asking a new car salesman why he is selling GM while personally driving an Audi.

[ghshephard]

Actually, the IPv6 stacks I've been seeing from Cisco are starting to look pretty good. The protocol, itself, shouldn't cause much in the way of concern for most network engineers. I'm interested to hear if the problems (which were myriad, and painful early on) you ran into in the last 10 years are still present in the more recent stacks from your vendor?

Speaking as a Network Engineer - I actually quite like IPv6. It took about 3+ years for my eyes (and brain) to get used to seeing 128 bit addresses, and remembering them, but I'm pretty good now. I think that's what the article is saying, too - the DoD wants people to start getting used to the protocol so that it doesn't take a crack team to deploy the protocol. As one who interviews network engineers frequently, I have yet to run into more than half a dozen out of 100 (and that's being generous) who could speak coherently about IPv6, and have never run into one who knew something as simple as what a solicited nodes multicast address was (basically the address you use for the IPv6 equivalent of ARP).

So - the technology is getting there, now we need to get the network engineers moving along...