Adventures in IPv6: Reliability and privacy concerns

This fairly accurately describes the current IPv6 situation. For his specific points:

* Hardware: this is a huge problem. Apple's routers support IPv6 just fine, but most of the other stuff is a mess. D-Link supports it in some revisions of some of their routers, but even then doesn't support IPv6 firewalling, opening up your whole network to the public

* Sites not working / testing: Facebook and others are currently pretty busy with testing IPv6. This unfortunately means that sometimes you'll get failures, like with the bit.ly. The Facebook thing is still only a test setup, which you explicitly use yourself, so you'll see issues there too

* Privacy: While it's a bit of a concern in some current implementations, everybody is moving towards enabling Privacy Extensions by default, which should mitigate this. Using your MAC address as a public identifier is IMHO a dumb idea, as you'll be able to be tracked across networks, people can determine what kind of hardware you're using, and it works for protocols outside of HTTP too (as you don't require cookies).

So, while the current situation is bumpy, I think this is a sign that people are actually working on IPv6 to implement it and improve it, rather than ignoring the IPv4 exhaustion altogether, so I guess it's a good sign.

Aside from the predictable troubles the author experienced as an early adopter, I find it interesting that he has stumbled on one of the few motives web hosts and service providers might have to deploy services on native v6 (instead of relying 6-to-4 NAT): easier tracking and profiling of customers, by recording the MAC portion of their visitors v6 IP addresses.

As an aside, the article author used ADSL from http://www.goscomb.net/. We don't use Goscomb for our ADSL, but we do have a VPS with them and they have always been absolutely incredible. I can't remember the last time anything was down and we have a fast Internet connection from the box with no noticeable latency.

Regarding the IP address privacy stuff...this can already be a problem with IPv4. At home, Comcast gives me IPv4 DHCP leases that get renewed to the same address for many months at a time. At work I (and most other employees) have a static IPv4 address. There is no way with IPv4 to do something like RFC3041 IPv6 random host addressing.