Noel ,
Really? As far as I can tell, there is still no general, defined, method to
allow an IPv6 host with a v6-only address (i.e. not an IPv4 address embedded
in an IPv6 address) to talk to an IPv4-only host.
So, for all that content which is IPv4 only, how does an IPv6-only host get
to it? And if there is no 'it just works' mechanism to do so, people will
definitely notice if their machines convert to IPv6.
For your specific problem there is NAT64 -
http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-behave-v6v4-framework and related
drafts (soon in IETF last call). This is an improved version of the old
NAT-PT mechanism.
FWIW, I have been behind some of this stuff for some time. It generally
"just works", largely for the same definition of "just works" that we
have for plain old IPv4 NATs, i.e., its far from a perfect solution but
still workable. There are a few additional issues though that get
exposed when you turn your network into an IPv6-only network. There's
generally very little operational experience of running IPv6-only
networks, so you'll be likely to run into at least some issues, such as
specific apps that fail to use IPv6-capable APIs, network detection tool
confusion from lack of IPv4 connectivity, DNS configuration issues, and
so on. Given all this, the general advice is still to run both IPv4 and
IPv6. Some networks are going to try the IPv6-only model even now,
however, and I hope that in a couple of years we can be there with a
larger number of users. But it is going to take work, mostly operational
and implementation work, perhaps also some minor standard changes. One
example of the type of standard changes is what we are currently doing
in 6MAN, bringing RFC 5006-based DNS discovery to a standard from an
experimental specification.
Jari
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