Non-IPv6 devices on an IPv6 network?

[mhamzahkhan]

Hey everyone,

I was just thinking about how once my ISP offers native IPv6 support, it would be nice to convert my home network into a pure IPv6 network (ie no IPv4 on client machines!).

But then I realised I would have a small problem, my two HP network printers do not support IPv6 (thanks a lot HP!!), and I very much doubt HP will release a firmware update which would give it IPv6 features as they haven't even bothered providing good drivers for Windows Vista/7. :/

So how would one deal with getting IPv4 only devices to work with IPv6 clients? Some sort of proxy?

Hamzah

[sput]

Hi there


Use a dual stack print server. The LAN prints to the server, the server to the printer.
I use lprng for this purpose.


Regards,
Rob

[cholzhauer]

if you can figure out the best way to do this, you'll make a lot of money.  this  is why there have been so many transition technologies developed, like 4in6, ect.

[sput]

Hi there


A lot of this stuff already exists. Any dual stack program with both client and server functionality (proxy) can do the job; mail servers, NTP servers, print servers, recursive nameservers, web proxies, etc.
And 6tunnel (which is a misnomer because it's not a tunnel), connects IPv4 only clients to IPv6 only servers and vice-versa.


Regards,
Rob

[antillie]

Exactly. I use a dual stacked Win2k8 box acting as a print server for this. The AD clients send their print jobs to the server via IPv6 and the server relays the jobs to the printer via IPv4. This also gives the benefit of central management of print jobs.

I suspect that most companies will do something like this on their networks with regards to printers since IPv4 only printers are so incredibly common. We may run out of public IPv4 space soon but I'm pretty sure RFC1918 will be large enough for an organization's printers for a long time.

[mhamzahkhan]

I thought about using a print server for this too, but then I realised the CUPS driver for my two printers sucks, and I only have Windows Server 2008.... which would also have this annoying driver problem!

But I only really gave the printer problem as an example, I was wondering more generally how would one deal with this problem. :)

I also have a few Cisco switches which only support IPv4 so I can't SSH into them using IPv6. :(

[jrocha]

For the foreseeable future, its probably not worth it to run an IPv6 only network. Dual-stack works perfectly fine. Nothing says that your internal network can't run off of RFC1918 space. Especially if you have ipv4-only hardware.

If you really want an IPv6-only network with IPv4 hardware, you'll probably have to setup some proxies/print servers/etc to talk to the IPv4 hardware.

[jimb]

What he said.