Hi,

I couldn't find any recent information on the subject in this forum. Are there any plans for IPv6 support in the Network Management interface? IPv6 is becoming critical, and I was quite surprised when I installed the Kubuntu 11.4 beta and saw no IPv6 support in the graphical interface.

Roberto

AFAIK the issues are not software but hardware related. Linux has supported IPv6 for some time but very little hardware does. Indeed, in some parts of the world IPv6 has to be turned off to avoid unnecessary delays.

The most immediate limitation on people without IPv6 will be 4G mobile 'phones which are all likely to use IPv6 because the IPv4 numbers have run out but, as IPv4 and IPv6 can be run in parallel, most people will not be affected by the lack of IPv6 access for some years.

Actually,

this is not the case. IPv6 (lika IPv4) is mostly implemented by software. Linux has it stable since 2.6.20 (before that, ip6tables had some annoying bugs). There are some hardware implementations, but these are usually for (very) high-performance oriented systems, like gigabit+ switches or routers. A few servers have some boards with those implementations for cpu offloading, but I've never personally seen one of those.

As an example, Gnome has IPv6 in it´s network configuration interface for quite some time. It is not hard to get IPv6 running just by editing /etc/network/interfaces. The problem is that if you use the graphical interface, editing this file by hand usually ends with problems. For servers I've been doing that for quite some time. But it's not viable to ask something like that from a day-to-day, non-tech oriented user.

So, is there someone working in adding IPv6 in the networking interface?

Tks,

Roberto

I don't know what the state of play is in KDE and I do know that IPv6 is implemented in software. But most routers currently in use in the UK only support IPv4 and NAS with IPv4 is the standard set up. There are a small number of small ISPs who support IPv6. One major ISP has recently started to distribute IPv6 routers but, as they have millions of customers on IPv4, this is a long term investment rather than an indication of any immediate change.

Your local situation may be different and there may be a local motivation to speed things up but for the majority of current Internet users IPv6 is not yet an issue.

I work currently in a Brazilian academic university. Many universities here already have IPv6 fully functional in their backbones, activated in many sub-networks, and support on their internet links. For example, from most of our servers, I can ping google and other international sites via IPv6, and in about 1 month the network I'm working personally will have full IPv6 running. So, I need to be able to control IPv6 in my desktop, although with auto configuration, IPv6 tends to work "auto-magically".

Roberto

Edit: I´ve just made a test in a "pure" IPv6 environment (using VMs), and kubuntu does pick and use IPv6 addresses as expected, since that's handled by the IPv6 stack. The problem is that, if I want a different address, say static, KDE does not give me the interface to do so.

The Ipv6 is strategic and solution communication platform. Microsoft windows is developing for supporting to IPv6(Internet protocols Version 6). IPv6 is the version of the IP(internet protocol),That design to succeed to the IPv4.

I would suggest filing a bug against KNetworkManager in this case.

Just checked the KNetworkManager widget and that has an option to set Link-Local which is an IPv6 option. As I don't have IPv6 I cannot test it but it looks as if at least some KDE people are working towards managing IPv6.