IP Convergence: Beyond VoIP, Beyond Cost Savings

I think most of the claimed benefits of IPv6 have proved illusory, with the exception of having a lot more addresses. I've been running it on my home network for a while, and it was easy to set up with Windows and trivially easy with MacOS X; a little more work with Unix, and setting up firewall rules and DNS a big pain (in the case of DNS, the problem was using Dan Bernstein's tinydns with an IPv6 patch, combined with OpenBSD which doesn't support IPv6 mapped IPv4 addresses).

The claimed security benefits of IPv6 have either been back-ported to IPv4 (e.g., IPsec) or turned out not to be the case (e.g., greater difficulty for worm and virus spread, largely refuted in [http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb/papers/v6worms.pdf|a paper by Steve Bellovin, Bill Cheswick, and Angelos Keromytis]).

The major benefits of running it at home are bragging rights and getting to see the animated turtle at [http://bert.secret-wg.org].