We have a couple of general purpose, general access networks that anyone can use to connect their devices to; one is a wired network (locally, it's called our 'RED' network after the colour of the network cables used for it), and the other is a departmental wireless network that's distinct from the centrally run university-wide network. However, both of these networks have a requirement that we need to be able to more or less identify who is responsible for a machine on them . Currently, this is done through (IPv4) DHCP and registering the Ethernet address of your device. This is a problem for any IPv6 deployment, because the Android developers refuse to support DHCPv6 .

We're starting to look more seriously at IPv6, including sort of planning out how our IPv6 subnets will probably work, so I came back to thinking about this issue recently. My conclusion and decision was to give up on letting Android devices use IPv6 on our networks. We can't use SLAAC (StateLess Address AutoConfiguration) because that doesn't require any sort of registration, and while Android devices apparently can use IPv6 Prefix Delegation, that would consume /64s at a prodigious rate using reasonable assumptions . We'd also have to build a system to do it. So there's no straightforward answer, and while I can think of potential hacks, I've decided that none of them are particular good options compared to the simple choice to not support IPv6 for Android by way of only supporting DHCPv6.

(Our requirement for registering a fixed Ethernet address also means that any device that randomizes its wireless Ethernet address on every connection has to turn that off. Hopefully all such devices actually have such an option.)

I'm only a bit sad about this, because you can only hope that a rock rolls uphill for so long before you give up. IPv6 is still not a critical thing in my corner of the world (as shown by how no one is complaining to us about the lack of it), so some phones continuing to not have IPv6 is not likely to be a big deal to people here.

(Android devices that can be connected to wired networking will be able to get IPv6 on some research group networks. Some research groups ask for their network to be open and not require pre-registration of devices (which is okay if it only exists in access-controlled space), and for IPv6 I expect we'll do this by turning on SLAAC on the research group's network and calling it a day.)