Cost of IPv6 for IT operations team

[Jussi Peltola]

I know plenty of industrial machines that speak the pre-IP Microsoft
protocols to get G code files into them. Some also depend on the clock
rate of their 486 CPU for timing. Some have a C compiler on disk that
was used to develop the control software they run.

IPv6-enabling these devices is rather irrelevant, as they never speak to
the outside world, only to some other almost-as-outdated hosts. Either you
keep rfc1918 v4 (or NetBIOS over IPX) enabled on the desktops speaking
to the machine control PC, or you make some kind of bastion host which
can have IPv6. Either way the protocol spoken among these hosts
(which are hopefully controlled by common administration) is quite
irrelevant for the big picture. Expecting to have 20 or 30 year old
software successfully sending and receiving packets on the wild wild
internet is not a good idea and IPv6 is not in the top 10 reasons for
this.

	Jussi

On Sat, Apr 04, 2015 at 04:20:43PM +0200, Mikael Abrahamsson wrote:
> On Fri, 3 Apr 2015, Ted Mittelstaedt wrote:
> 
> >"normal hardware refresh cycles" is something the Fortune 1000
> >have. It's a nice concept but not one universally adopted by
> >everyone else in the real world.  Another one of these is
> >"hardware service contracts" That's not universally adopted,
> >either.
> 
> Obviously, otherwise Win XP market share wouldn't be where it is
> considering MS has stopped supporting it.
> 
> The state of the SCADA and other "industry" applications is the
> result of a near total disregard for security when it comes to
> application programming. This will hopefully improve, but it'll take
> time, the same way IPv6 adoption will take time. However, it's still
> the truth that if you're buying equipment today that you intend to
> have around for 5-10 years and you don't check them for IPv6
> functionality, you're being short-sighted.
> 
> -- 
> Mikael Abrahamsson    email: swmike at swm.pp.se