IPv6 Transition

NANOGGING

There are many network operator group meetings being held these days. Even in the backwater of the South Pacific where I live there is now AUSNOG, and NZNOG is just next door in New Zealand. We now have MENOG in the Middle East and AFNOG in Africa. The original NOG was the North American Network Operators Group (NANOG), and they have the T-Shirts to prove it! NANOG meets three times a year, and I attended NANOG 41 in October 2007. NANOG meetings cover a broad variety of topics, from operational tools, measurement, and peering practices through to a commentary on the state of the Internet industry. Here are my impressions of the meeting.

IPv6 Deployment: A Very Complex Time Bomb with an Uncertain Trigger Date

I did a 2 hour interview on October 23rd with John Curran, Board Chair of ARIN the North American Regional Internet Routing Registry for the last decade. I now understand what is at stake with IPv6. Outside of a key core group of network engineers I think darn few people do understand. And not all of them agree on how the scenario plays out though virtually all say the situation is very serious. John believes that it is huge. It is as big as Y2K except no one knows a precise date by which everything has to be done...

In Praise of OpenDNS and a Wii Factoid

If you are not already using OpenDNS on your home network I have one question for you. Why not? When it debuted, OpenDNS' main advantage was speed. It is a great deal faster than the DNS operated by most ISPs so, if you configure your border router/DHCP server to use OpenDNS name servers, the t'internet magically speeds up... On looking at the OpenDNS stats for my home network the other day, one item gave me cause to scratch my head a little. There was a non-trivial number of AAAA look-ups going on. In case you don't know (and I know you do), AAAA look-ups are IPv6 address look-ups...

Developing Internet Standards: How Can the Engineering Community and the Users Meet?

There is currently a discussion going on between Milton Mueller and Patrik Fältström over the deployment of DNSSEC on the root servers. I think the discussion exemplifies the difficult relation between those who develop standards and those who use them. On the one hand, Milton points out that the way the signing of the root zone will be done will have a great influence on the subjective trust people and nation states will have towards the system. On the other hand, Patrik states that "DNSSEC is just digital signatures on records in this database". Both are right, of course, but they do not speak the same language...

ARIN Statement on the Future of Addressing Policy

ARIN has just released a statement on the future of addressing policy. Specifically addressing the future of IPv4 addressing. What ARIN does is to emphasize the current policies and say they will be enforced even stronger than today if needed. I.e. there is no announcement of a change in policy.

Transition to IPv6 Address

Last month's column looked at the exhaustion of the IPv4 unallocated address pool and the state of preparedness in the Internet to grapple with this issue... There has been a considerable volume of discussion in various IPv6 and address policy forums across the world about how we should respond to this situation in terms of development of address distribution policies. Is it possible to devise address management policies that might both lessen some of the more harmful potential impacts of this forthcoming hiatus in IPv4 address supply, and also provide some impetus to industry to move in the originally intended direction to transition into an IPv6 network?

Scarcity of IPv4 Addresses

My friend Kurtis writes in his blog some points he has been thinking of while discussing "when we run out of IPv4 addresses". In reality, as he points out so well, we will not run out. It will be harder to get addresses. It is also the case that unfortunately people that push for IPv6 claim IPv6 will solve all different kinds of problem. Possibly also the starvation problems in the world...

The End of the (IPv4) World is Nigher!

Funny how some topics seem sit on a quiet back burner for years, and then all of a sudden become matters of relatively intense attention. Over the past few weeks we've seen a number of pronouncements on the imminent exhaustion of the IP version 4 address pools. Not only have some of the Regional Internet Registries (RIRs) and some national registry bodies made public statements on the topic, we've now seen ICANN also make its pronouncement on this topic... Why the sudden uptake of interest in this topic? I suspect that a small part of this may be my fault!

What Prevents IPv6 Deployment in Europe

ZDNet UK has an article on IPv6 and what may slow down its deployment. Jay Daley, from Nominet points out to the fact that the current IPv6 allocation policy used by RIPE NCC is geared towards ISPs. This is a complaint I have heard time and time again. Under the current policy, you have to show to RIPE NCC that you are going to allocate 200 address blocks to your customers before you are allocated a /32 block. Obviously, a large corporate network cannot afford to renumber every time it switches ISPs...

More IPv6 Warnings on Why Organizations Must Plan Transition Now

The IPv6 Portal reports on a paper titled "The Choice: IPV4 Exhaustion or Transition to IPv6", written by Jordi Palet, warning that organizations must start planning for IPv6 now or "be aware that some already have, and you are beginning to be at a disadvantage." From the report: "This is going to affect the business of existing Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and to a greater extent, at a certain point in time, the creation of new ISPs. As a consequence if may have a deeper impact in developing regions (Africa, Asia and Latin America/Caribbean) where the penetration of the Internet is not yet so widespread."