Another IPv6 Day

On June 6^th, there was another IPv6 day. As the snom m9 is one of the few devices that I know of which supports IPv6, that day was a special day for us. We know that a few folks are using IPv6 with the m9, but honestly it would be great to get more feedback if we are done with the IPv6 support.

It seems the biggest change was that Google added an AAAA record for the email server address. That screwed a lot of email clients up, and I am not sure if Google kept the records or just had set a very long TTL, so that the problem did not go away on the next day. Actually, if the m9 would have been exposed to IPv6 and the SIP server also supports IPv6, the transition should have been very smooth. The user should not have even noticed it. I don’t believe many m9 users actually had that experience.

My biggest concern is that the firewall manufacturers will advertise NAT as a security feature also for IPv6 and the purchase departments are too clueless to find out that this is nonsense. The idea of a 50 USD router with the IPv6-ready logo sticker on the gift box scares me. Probably we only have to wait until some smart-ass lawyer sues a router manufacturer because they exposed “private” IPv6 address to the public, and a badly configured PC in the LAN gets hacked (that’s why we have stickers on the microwave telling us not to put mister hamster into the device). Then all legal departments of the router manufacturers in the world will take over and mandate that addresses in the LAN are not exposed to the public, evil internet. I even hear that they are now trying to put that functionality into the Linux kernel, so they say, to make sure that at least the NAT implementation is not as buggy as with IPv4. If that should happen, the whole exercise with IPv6 was for nothing and we will still associate VoIP with on way audio: Can you hear me? Maybe not hearing the other side is a security feature, for some people. Not for me.