Cost of IPv6 for IT operations team

[Ted Mittelstaedt]

The industrial machine was only used as an example to keep the
fools from replying "why would anyone want to run Windows XP anymore"

There are
still a lot of orgs that run it and run Chrome on it.  And a simple 
registry tweak gets you all of the patches that MS released for
Windows Embedded for POS systems and all of those apply to XP.

Mikael was right in that it is a good idea to select for IPv6 for
new purchases.

But you are both ignoring the point that many if not the majority
of smaller ogs do not replace working gear just because it's old.

The usual replacement drivers are the desire for new must-have features.

A secondary replacement driver is simple hardware failure.  But hardware
failure on the PC market takes a lot longer than most PC manufacturers
would like, despite the electrolytic capacitor issues of the last decade.

I would guess XP is going to truly be a niche OS in another 5 years. 
But until then a lot of people are still using it.

Ted

On 4/4/2015 12:50 PM, Jussi Peltola wrote:
> 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 the outside world, only to some other almost-as-outdated hosts.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