U.S. military strong-arming IT industry on IPv6

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

Dan Bernstein outlines why it has been so difficult to transition to IPv6:<p><a href="http://cr.yp.to/djbdns/ipv6mess.html" rel="nofollow">http://cr.yp.to/djbdns/ipv6mess.html</a>

Like Walmart and barcodes, maybe this is the final push that's needed. As for strong-arming, I'd say they have every right to demand suppliers who eat their own dog food. They've got a lot at stake.

Just the other day I was pleasantly surprised to notice my MacBook using IPv6 to stream a song over to my Apple TV (remote speakers). For grins I disabled v6 on the interface to see what would happen. The stream cut out briefly and then resumed over IPv4.

If the US military can save us from depleting IP addresses maybe they'll save us from running out of oil, too.<p>Damn... It seems to take a government agency to keep the world spinning.

Nice. I am pleased to say that even my TV has a globally-routable IPv6 address. (Unfortunately, I've never actually had physical IPv6 connectivity anywhere, so I always have to VPN to my internal IPv4 network. I have SSH'd from my server with IPv6 connectivity, though, and it worked :)<p>Oh well, at least I'm cooler than my friends :)

Sounds like arm twisting, but does anyone have an alternative plan?