IPv6 and Microsoft - An excerpt from an Indepedndent study of mine on IPv6

[Ramesh Shanmuganathan]

Hi!

I was doing an independent study on IPv6 at Rochester Institute of
Technology as part my master's program.I did happen to look at Microsoft's
current state of IPv6 research and development. This is what I found from
there web site. I hope it's useful.

Regards,
Ramesh


Microsoft's implementation is a work-in-progress and does not yet support
all of the features of the IPv6 protocol. The features that are currently
supported are:
 Basic IPv6 header processing
 Hop-By-Hop and Destination Options headers
 Fragmentation header
 Neighbor Discovery
 Stateless address autoconfiguration
 ICMPv6
 Multicast Listener Discovery (a.k.a. IGMPv6)
 Automatic and configured tunnels
 IPv6 over IPv4 (Carpenter/Jung draft)
 UDP and TCP over IPv6
 Raw packet transmission

They do not (yet) support mobility, authentication, encryption, or routing
headers. Our next major release will have at least the minimum required
mobility support as well as partial authentication and security support.
They have done some interoperability testing at the UNH interoperability
Lab, and have a machine on the 6bone. They do especially encourage other
IPv6 implementers to download their code for testing.

The current release runs on NT 4 and NT 5 build 1773 (or later). Build 1773
was distributed at WinHEC '98. (NT 5 Beta 2 will be supported when it is
available. NT 5 Beta 1 is not supported.) At this time, Microsoft Research
has no plans to support this experimental stack on Windows 95 or Windows 98.
It is their choice to implement IPv6 in NT as a separate protocol stack from
the existing IPv4 stack. This allows for ease of experimentation with IPv6
without affecting existing IPv4 functionality.

They also have available applications and utilities such as ping6, tracert6,
ttcp6 (over both UDP and TCP), and ftp6/ftpd6. Those for which we can freely
distribute the source code are included in the release. For more info, visit
MS V6:http://research.microsoft.com/msripv6/


_________________________________________________________________

Ramesh Shanmuganathan
233D Perkins Green
Perkins Road
Rochester
NY 14623
Tel: 716-424-8384/8796
E-mail: s.ramesh-rit@ieee.org
Internet: http://www.rit.edu/~rxs6469