[En-Nut-Discussion] IPv6

[Harald Kipp]

Hi Johan,

First of all thanks for your kind words about Nut/OS. Though we all 
know, that Nut/OS hadn't been a bed of roses all the time.

Johan van der Stoel wrote:

> The last year I have read more and more articles about the demand for
> transition to IPv6. What I also see is many products are ready for this
> transition, but most embedded products are not. We already get questions
> from customers about when we will support IPv6. Today I have no real
> answer...

My view is slightly different. IPv6 had been a big topic many years ago. 
I remember, that at that time my company had 8 officially allocated IP 
addresses. It really looked like the Internet world is running out of 
address space. However, DHCP and specifically NAT dramatically changed 
the situation. Actually some IPv6 advocates tried to prohibit NAT, 
because it delays the change to IPv6. In a way I agree, because the 
initial intention of the Internet was to provide a unique address to 
each node. On the other hand I'm afraid, that selling IP addresses would 
become a big business, like domain name registration is today. Can you 
imagine, that there had been a time of free IP addresses and free domain 
registration? Good ol' days...

I recently looked into Adam Dunkels' uIP again, which supports IPv6. To 
me it doesn't look complicated. Quite the contrary, as it is limited to 
single layer only and a few variables. As a first action, I'd suggest to 
add it to the feature request list at SourceForge.

For me the next question would be, how to test this in our IPv4 
infrastructure.

Harald