IPv6 ontwikkelingen

"Fanboy" series - IPv6 and NATs

2010-12-16T23:45:00.000+01:00

Overheid moet IPv6-migratie isp's subsidiëren

2010-11-15T15:28:00.000+01:00

Internetpionier Vint Cerf roept overheden op isp's financiële prikkels te geven om zo de overgang naar het nieuwe internetprotocol IPv6 te bespoedigen.

Cerf deed dat pleidooi tijdens een bezoek aan het Verenigd Koninkrijk afgelopen week, schrijft eWeek Europe. Cerf reageerde ermee op het standpunt van de Britse regering om de overgang naar IPv6 voornamelijk adviserend op te treden. Cerf oppert een systeem van belastingvoordelen voor providers bij aanschaf van IPv6-apparatuur. "Een financiële stimulans kan helpen bij de invoering", aldus de internetevangelist in dienst van Google.

Lees verder op WebWereld

Genomineerden IPv6 Awards bekend

2010-11-12T16:38:00.000+01:00

Nog maar 215 dagen en dan zijn de Internetadressen op. De oplossing voor dat dringende probleem heet Internetprotocol versie 6 (IPv6).
De Nederlandse TaskForce IPv6 vraagt hier aandacht voor door op 25 november aanstaande voor de tweede keer op rij de IPv6 awards uit te reiken. Veertien bedrijven en instellingen zijn momenteel genomineerd en maken kans op een award voor de beste operationele implementatie met IPv6.
De TaskForce wil met de uitreiking van de awards aandacht vragen voor de noodzakelijke overstap van IPv4 naar IPv6.

In totaal heeft de TaskForce IPv6 dit jaar 30 aanmeldingen van implementaties ontvangen.
In de categorie particulieren waren er helaas geen aanmeldingen.
Bij het selecteren van de genomineerden heeft de jury gelet op motivatie, relevantie, toewijding, implementatie en impact.

Lees verder op de website van de IPv6 Task Force Nederland

Internetgrondlegger: 'Dit is meest tumultueuze tijd'

2010-11-12T16:35:00.002+01:00

Vincert Cerf, een van de grondlegger van internet, waarschuwt voor de laksheid bij internetaanbieders hun systeem klaar te maken voor IPv6. 'De ontwikkeling van het web komt krakend tot stilstand'

Lees de rest in de Automatiseringsgids

IPv6 Transition Poses New Security Threats

2010-09-10T08:36:00.000+02:00

Next-generation IP protocol comes with more security as well as some potential flaws of its own
By Kelly Jackson Higgins
DarkReading

Aardig artikel over IPv6, alhoewel de titel anders doet vermoeden. Een aantal alinea's spraken mij persoonlijk erg aan:

Cricket Liu, vice president of architecture for Infoblox, says the biggest threat will be organizations misconfiguring their IPv6 systems. "Until you understand it, you're not going to configure it right. So there are going to be a lot of mistakes, and [that will be] the source of a lot of vulnerabilities in the configurations."

en

He says any security glitches with IPv6 aren't about the technology itself, but in how an organization uses the technology. "It depends on how you implement the technology. If organizations carefully plan and consider how to put things on the network with IPv6, they will benefit" from it, he says. That means mapping out what security controls should be in place for both IPv4 and IPv6 in the transition, he says.

Lees het hele artikel op dark reading

Sterke groei uitgifte IPv4- en IPv6-adressen

2010-04-27T18:17:00.000+02:00

De groei van zowel IPv4- en IPv6-adressen zet onverminderd door. De pool vrije IPv4-adressen van centrale autoriteit IANA is daardoor nu geslonken tot 7,8%, terwijl dit eind 2009 nog 8,5% was. Daar tegenover staat dat in 2009 het aantal toegekende IPv6-adressen met 30% gestegen is, blijkt uit het The Internet Number Resource Status Report van de NRO.

Opvallend is dat grootste hoeveelheid IPv4-adressen door het Aziatische Regional Internet Registry (RIR) APNIC wordt uitgegeven, totaal geeft het registry ruim de helft meer IPv4-adressen uit dan een van de andere RIR’s. In de tussenstanden is APNIC in 2010 ook verantwoordelijk voor de grootste hoeveelheid uitgegeven IPv6-adressen. Azië hongert dus naar IP-adressen en daardoor komt de bodem van de pool IPv4-adressen snel dichtbij.

Lees verder op ISPam

NRO report highlights strong growth in both IPv4 and IPv6 allocations

2010-04-22T11:00:00.000+02:00

A new report issued by the Number Resource Organization (NRO) has found that demand for both IPv4 and IPv6 address space is continuing to grow. The Internet Number Resource Status Report for the first quarter of 2010 is based on data collected by the five Regional Internet Registries (RIRs) that oversee the allocation of all Internet number resources, and outlines RIR allocation of IP address space (IPv4 and IPv6), as well as AS number assignments.

Lees verder op Wire Service Canada

10 reasons to use DirectAccess and Unified Access Gateway (UAG) 2010

2010-04-20T21:21:00.002+02:00

Using UAG as your DirectAccess server solution provides a number of significant advantages. Deb Shinder looks at what DirectAccess offers and describes the benefits of using UAG.

Lees verder op TechRepublic

What Enterprises Should Do About IPv6 In 2010

2010-04-13T11:05:00.001+02:00

The purpose of this white paper is to provide enterprises with guidance, based on a three- to five-year outlook, on how IPv6 should be included in their network design, planning, and operations starting today. The intended audience is enterprise network administrators.

This document will explore the area of the network and beyond where IPv6 needs to be considered and the reasons to consider it. In 2010 enterprises should assess their position toward IPv6 with an aim to drafting their own requirements, plans, and opportunities. Indeed, some have already identified IPv6 as a networking tool, better than a (re)numbering constraint, and everybody should share this opportunity.

Lees verder op Cisco.com

IPv6: Enabling the Information Society

2010-04-11T14:16:00.000+02:00

All languages have syntactic rules. Those rules govern the structure of sentences and allow communication. The Internet also has its own language and its own syntax. All computers and electronic devices need that syntax to communicate on the web. It is known as the "Internet Protocol". The European Commission encourages the widespread adoption of its sixth version, the Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) on the basis of a specific action plan that should be fully implemented by 2010.

The adoption of IPv6 will facilitate the deployment of online mobile communications. It is also essential to ensure the growth and development of tomorrow's Internet. The mentioned action plan builds upon previous initiatives.

Why do we need an "Internet Protocol" ?
The Internet Protocol determines the assignment of all online IP addresses of our electronic devices. All PCs and electronic devices that connect to the web need one of these IPs to identify themselves and communicate with other PCs or devices. The first version of the Internet Protocol appeared in the 1970s. In 1984, its fourth version, "IPv4", became a global standard. However, over the years, an improved version has been developed: "IPv6".

Why does the Commission support the deployment of IPv6?

IPv6 provides many more IP addresses than previous IP versions, such as IPv4.

According to some estimates, the existing pool of 4 billion IP addresses provided by the IPv4 will be exhausted by 2011. IPv6 will allow every citizen, network operator or organization to have as many IP addresses as they need to connect every conceivable device to the Internet: mobile phones, car navigation systems, home appliances (such as fridges, lamps, heating devices, plugs), industrial equipment, etc. IPv6 would provide more locations in cyberspace than grains of sand on the world's beaches – billions of billions of IPs: 3.4×1038 to be precise.

IPv6 offers many technological advantages that have significant economic impact.

Increased address space that is also easier to manage. With IPv6 a large number of devices or goods can be easily networked, at anytime and from anywhere (your home, your office, your car). IPv6 allows for "auto-configuration": the addition of a new device can be done without any further action. Applications such as Virtual Private Networks, Voice over Internet Protocols (VoIPs) or Peer-to-Peer Networking would also be easier to handle and more powerful.
A key driver for many new mobile/wireless applications and services which might be too complicated and/or costly in an IPv4 environment.
An essential technology for implementing ambient intelligence
Empowered users, who will be able to connect their own network to the Internet.
A competitive advantage for Europe in world markets. The technological opportunities IPv6 provides contribute to innovation and competitiveness.

Verizon conducts dual stack IPv6/IPv4 FiOS subscriber test

2010-04-08T20:15:00.002+02:00

Verizon may have already been working to meet IPv6 address compliance mandates for its large business and government customers, but with the American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN) predicting that in 2011 the U.S. may be out of IPv4 addresses the service provider is turning its attention to its residential FiOS broadband customer base.

To gain a better sense of how it could transition its FiOS customer base from IPv4 to IPv6 addressing, Verizon is conducting a month-long trial with many of its employee subscribers in its Reston, Virginia market. For the trial, Verizon has equipped each home with custom CPE that simultaneously supports both IPv6 and IPv4.

On the network side, Verizon will also incorporate dual support for the two protocols on its edge network routers. By leveraging 6PE technology, the edge routers will be connected over the service provider's IPv4 MPLS core network, while the IPv6 traffic is sent over IPv6-capable peering connections.

Jean McManus, executive director, packet network technology for Verizon, said the initial goal of the current trial is to help Verizon "get a better understanding of dual stack, how it performs based on our embedded supplier and also have the opportunity to work with dual stack CPE."

While the trial will allow the user to send IP packets through the dual stack CPE up to the dual stack edge router and into Verizon's core network sounds interesting, one can't forget that the trial is focused on consumers, many of which aren't typically technically savvy. That then begs the obvious question is what benefit will the transition to IPv6 bring to the everyday FiOS consumer?

For one, having IPv6 capabilities in place means that the router would no longer require network address translation (NAT), meaning that one public Internet address could be translated into multiple private addresses to serve a host of IP-enabled home devices (PCs, game consoles, etc).

"We're looking at it right now as a network address exhaust problem, but it's also an opportunity," McManus said. "There are service opportunities when you go to v6. Because you get rid of NAT in the CPE all of a sudden there are a number of different services that are feasible with v6 that with v4 you may have had issues with."

Two big reasons for adopting IPv6

2010-04-06T21:27:00.000+02:00

Federal Security Spotlight this week features Doug Montgomery, manager of the Internet and Scalable Systems group at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).

The topic - IPv6, Part II, and the cybersecurity implications of not converting over to this new protocol.

While the purpose of IPv6 is primarily to allow the continued growth of the Internet as the world approaches the exhaustion of IPv4 addresses, there are never-the-less cyber implications. Agencies should be further along than they are.

NIST explains its newly revised guidance for the secure deployment of IPv6.

Kamer wil IPv6 verplichten bij aanbesteding

2010-03-18T17:19:00.002+01:00

Om zaken te kunnen blijven doen met de overheid zullen leveranciers waarschijnlijk nog dit jaar IPv6 moeten ondersteunen. Een kamermeerderheid steunt het plan van de SP.
Dat bleek gisteren in het debat tussen de Tweede Kamer en demissionair minister van Economische Zaken Maria van der Hoeven (CDA). Tijdens het debat stelde voor SP-kamerlid Arda Gerkens leveranciers te verplichten IPv6 aan te bieden bij aanbestedingen. Binnenkort wil de politica daarover een motie indienen.

Harde eis breed gesteund
“Wat ik wil is dat dit wordt meegenomen in de lijst met eisen”, vertelt Gerkens tegenover Webwereld. Zo'n harde eis is nodig, omdat het meenemen van de versie van het internetprotocol nu nagenoeg geen rol speelt.

Een motie moet een volgend kabinet verplichten haast te maken met het toevoegen van een eis. Wie dan geen IPv6 kan aanbieden, hoeft dan niet te overwegen mee te dingen naar een opdracht.

Al voordat de motie is geschreven, is al duidelijk dat deze kan rekenen op een kamermeerderheid. CDA en PvdA steunen het plan in ieder geval. “Daarmee is nu al duidelijk dat er haast moet worden gemaakt”, jubelt de politica.

Urgent probleem
Al meer dan tien jaar wordt er gesproken over IPv6, toch is het protocol nog bijna nergens een verplichting. Het onderwerp is wel urgent, omdat steeds duidelijk wordt dat er inmiddels minder dan 10 procent van de IPv4-adressen over is. Voor een overstap zullen zowel programmatuur als hardware-oplossingen het nieuwere protocol moeten ondersteunen.

Ook Minister van der Hoeven ziet de problematiek en laat direct uitzoeken of het verplicht aanbieden van IPv6 mogelijk is. Een optie is om de standaard verplicht te stellen op de lijst van het Forum Standaardisatie. Ook zonder aanbesteding zal software dan moeten voldoen of heeft de overheid iets uit te leggen.

Dat er dan toch een motie moet volgen is volgens Gerkens niet vreemd. “Als het een motie is dan ligt er direct een harde wens van de Tweede Kamer waar een nieuwe regering mee aan de slag moet”, vertelt ze. “Anders blijft het iets waar deze regering mee bezig is en dat zou bij een volgend kabinet dan geen prioriteit hebben.”

Volgens experts lost IPv6 niet alleen problemen op, maar werkt het versnellend op het netwerk, biedt het meer mogelijkheden tot beveiliging en is de techniek erg geschikt voor onder andere mobiele telefoons.

Gepubliceerd: Donderdag 18 maart 2010
Auteur: Brenno de Winter

Cisco ASA Version 8.3

2010-03-18T17:14:00.000+01:00

Cisco’s latest ASA software version adds significant functionality
IPv6 LAN-to-LAN Manually-Configured TunnelsWhile many of you may not be migrating to IPv6 right now you should still be forming your IPv6 transition strategy today. One of those strategies may involve creating a tunnel through your lame IPv4-only service provider to an ISP that has IPv6 capabilities. If you have a router outside your firewall then this is where you would most-likely configure this tunnel. However, if you have an environment where your handoff to your current ISP is the outside Ethernet interface on your ASA, now you can configure an IPv6 LAN-to-LAN tunnel.

IPv6-Enabled Stateful Failover
Early adopters of IPv6 on their ASAs have been familiar with this limitation for a while now. In release 8.2(1) and earlier, there were limitations on how you could configure an HA pair of ASA firewalls that had IPv6-addressed interfaces. The new version eliminates these issues and allows interfaces using IPv6 addresses to perform in the stateful active/passive failover.

Lees de rest van het artikel op Network World

IPv6: moeten we ons druk maken

2010-03-10T10:33:00.002+01:00

Een mooie uitleg van Emile Bons over IPv6. Er zitten wat fouten in (IP adressen zijn bijvoorbeeld niet evenredig per werelddeel verdeeld) en ik ben het niet helemaal eens met de conclusie dat we ons nog geen zorgen hoeven te maken, maar afgezien daarvan is het een goed artikel.

Lees het volledige bericht en de bijbehorende PDF.

‘Zonder IPv6 geen verbinding met China’

2010-03-09T11:30:00.000+01:00

Een interessant artikel op Techworld afgelopen week, waarbij de noodzaak van IPv6 opnieuw wordt uitgelegd door onder andere Erik Huizer, de voorzitter van de IPv6-taskforce in Nederland. Hij legt daarbij uit waarom het (voor ondernemers) belangrijk is nu al rekening te houden met IPv6.

Als voorbeeld wordt genoemd dat na 2012 de adressen echt op zijn, mogelijk al eerder. Per jaar komen er 2 miljard breedband-aansluitingen bij waar met name in China de groei het hoogst is. Volgens Hulzer zullen daar dan ook de eerste IPv6-only aansluitingen zijn. Daarnaast benadrukt hij dat ondernemingen nu al een plan moeten hebben, met name voor de hardware die de komende maanden aangeschaft zal worden. Gezien de afschrijftijd hiervan is IPv6-ondersteuning geen luxe maar een harde noodzaak.

Volgens Huizer is een IPv6-netwerk makkelijker en goedkoper te bouwen en te onderhouden. “Met IPv4 moest je IP-adressen en subnets en dergelijke toewijzen. Het nieuwe internet protocol neemt dat uit handen”, zo schrijft Techworld.

Bron: ISPam

A10 Networks introduceert CGN en DS-Lite producten

2010-02-24T11:49:00.003+01:00

Persbericht:

A10 Networks, the technology leader in Application Delivery Controllers (ADCs), today announced the availability of IPv6 migration solutions for Carriers and Internet Service Providers (ISPs) within its AX Series platforms: Large Scale NAT (LSN) and Dual-Stack Lite (DS-Lite).

Demand for Internet Protocol (IP) addresses is rapidly increasing for Carriers and ISPs with more IP-enabled devices pushing the existing available IPv4 address pool to exhaustion. The popularity of applications on smart-phones and other mobile devices has further exasperated and accelerated this trend. As a solution, the progressive introduction and transition to IPv6 in network and service infrastructures shows a need for both IPv4 and IPv6 networks to coexist. The industry is currently focusing on DS-Lite LSN capable devices to address the IPv6 migration issue. "

A10 is working with several of the world's largest Carriers and ISPs with Large Scale NAT and DS-Lite solutions within the AX Series appliances. Our DS-Lite and LSN solutions leverage A10's revolutionary Advanced Core Operating System (ACOS) to deliver unparalleled performance and scalability," said Lee Chen, Founder and CEO for A10 Networks. "IPv6 migration technology is a strategic focus area for A10 with significant growth potential. The co-existence of IPv4 and IPv6 is very likely to last several years, if not decades. A10 continues to expand the AX Series solutions for Carriers and ISPs to become the technology leader in this early stage market."

Large Scale NAT
Large Scale NAT (LSN), also known as Carrier Grade NAT (CGN), helps ISPs continue to grow their business by alleviating the IPv4 address shortage with intelligent sharing of public IPv4 addresses among multiple customers.

Key benefits of LSN include:

Standardizes behavior for IPv4 NAT devices
Consistent behavior and expectations for applications
Tolerance for varied traffic patterns and protocol behavior

Defines behavior for NATs, which can be deployed in service provider networks
Fairness in resource sharing
Consistent, deterministic & transparent operation
Support for "pass-through" trafficHigh-speed logging

Delivers efficiency through features, and examples include:
Hairpinning
Sticky internal IP to external IP mapping
Endpoint-independent mapping and filtering

Dual-Stack Lite
Dual-Stack Lite (DS-Lite) encourages and enables incremental IPv6 deployment while leveraging LSN to facilitate IPv4 address scaling. DS-Lite outsources Customer Premises Equipment (CPE) embedded NAT capabilities to the carrier NAT device, hence preserving a single level of NAT. DS-Lite involves encapsulation/de-capsulation of privately-addressed IPv4 traffic into IPv6 datagrams as well as native IPv6 forwarding capabilities.

Key benefits for DS-Lite include:

Encourages and enables incremental IPv6 deployment
Facilitates a single IPv6 network to serve IPv4 and IPv6 clients
Supports both native IPv6 and traditional IPv4 concurrently
Leverages LSN to scale IPv4 addresses
Single Layer of NAT
Easier CPE address management
Simplifies deployment and management

High-performance NAT Platform
The AX Series family is specifically built for processor intensive, high-volume networking tasks such as NAT, in addition to core Application Acceleration, Layer 4-7 Server Load Balancing and Security and DDoS protection features. The AX Series is built upon the revolutionary Advanced Core Operating System (ACOS), which integrates a modern multi-core, shared memory and symmetrical multiprocessing architecture for significant performance advantages.

Additional benefits include:

Carrier-grade, high-performance hardware and software platform
Highly scalable session establishment rates and concurrent session capacities
High volume of NAT packets per second
Throughput up to 40 Gbps today
Stateful high availability for robustness

Bron: A10 Networks

Erik Huizer: In 2011 is het internet VOL

2010-02-18T11:29:00.000+01:00

Erik Huizer taskforce Vz IPv6. In 2011 is het internet VOL from vincente on Vimeo.

My customers are not interested in IPv6 ... what can I do?

2010-02-18T09:51:00.000+01:00

Shivlu left an interesting comment to my IPv6 is not ready for residential deployment post. He wrote: “Still no customer is ready for IPv6. How do I convince them?” The unfortunate answer to this problem is: you can't, but they'll only hurt themselves. If they persist long enough, they’ll become obsolete.

The migration issues are just one of the topics covered in the Enterprise IPv6 Deployment workshop. You can attend an online version of the workshop or we can organize a dedicated event for your team.

The web content providers have long realized that their customers have too many choices. Zvezdan Martič, one of the participants in the last year’s Slovenian IPv6 summit roundtable succinctly explained this phenomenon: “nobody cares whether my web site can be viewed in Internet Explorer or Firefox; if I don’t support the major browsers, the customers will find one of my competitors that does.”

In the IPv6 world, the likely unfolding of events will go along these major milestones:

Dual-stack clients and pilot IPv6 content.
We’ve entered this phase 15 years ago, when the IPv6 RFCs were published, but it only gained significant traction in the last months. Not surprisingly, Google has been on the forefront of IPv6 content deployment; they are one of the few companies that make true profit off the Internet and missing just a few percents of their customer base is a huge loss.

IPv6-only clients and NAT64.
IPv4 addresses will run out. You can live in denial, but it will happen. Large portions of the current Internet content will not be reachable over IPv6. Knowing the procrastinating mindsets of most PHBs I am willing to bet on that. The early adopters of IPv6-only clients (most likely the mobile networks) will have to deploy NAT64 to reach IPv4 content. However, as good as NAT64 might be, it will have deficiencies that will make native IPv6 applications more compelling.

New IPv6-only applications.
As soon as the critical mass of IPv6 clients will emerge, someone will create a snowball application that will only run on IPv6 (because life without NAT is easier), prompting users to move to IPv6 (just imagine Facebook having some exclusive features available only to IPv6 clients).

IPv4 content becomes obsolete.
Once the customers start using IPv6 exclusively, they will start ignoring old content reachable over the NAT64 path. At that point in time, the few web sites that ignored the new reality will slowly wither and die.

Read more: http://blog.ioshints.info/2010/02/my-customers-are-not-interested-in-ipv6.html

IPv6 and the Swedish Public Sector

2010-02-16T12:02:00.000+01:00

This article has been authored by Jörgen Eriksson and Torbjörn Eklöv. It is originally published on CircleID.

No one can have failed to notice that the last IPv4 address will soon be allocated. We have lived with a shortage of addresses for 15 years, but when the last address is allocated, the shortage will become acute, instead of just a pain, as it is today. There is much to read on http://www.ipv6forum.se and http://www.ipv6actnow.org/.

In The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams describes the least expensive and most effective method for making something invisible. You simply decide that it is Someone Else's Problem or SEP, if you abbreviate. This is an approach that is frighteningly similar to the Swedish public sector's view of the address shortage on the Internet. "It is not our problem—if we ignore it, it will probably go away."

The only reasonable solution for the long term is currently called IPv6, a technology that has been available for many years but which few have begun to use. We wondered a bit about how well the Swedish public sector is prepared for IPv6. We talked to a person who works with IT procurement, who said that he was not aware of a single procurement in recent years that required support for IPv6. One can wonder why this is so. One explanation is that the Legal, Financial and Administrative Services Agency, which currently handles procurement for the public sector, has not completed its procurement requirements, since the E-Delegation's study "Strategy for the authorities' work with e-administration" (SOU 2009:86) is still being circulated for comment. Hopefully, but far from certainly, this study will clearly indicate the need for IPv6 and other technologies as a basic requirement to ensure a stable and accessible Internet also in the future!

We have several proposals for the Swedish public sector that we hope they will adopt - not to be caught unprepared the day the Internet as we know it changes drastically.

Demand IPv6 from your Internet supplier According to a study in October 2009, only 15 percent of Sweden's Internet suppliers are able to provide IPv6 (source). Those who cannot do so should be disqualified in an automated procurement, and as customers, you must put pressure on them by demanding that they activate IPv6 directly at installation. Do not let them get away with vague promises of "in the autumn!" If they cannot support IPv6 now, they have no place in the market.

There are also suppliers that state that they are able to support IPv6, but a critical examination reveals that it is not as easy as they promise! So demand references for the same connection type and geographic area before signing any contracts. A good example is Telia, which needed about four months from order to delivery of IPv6. And they are not even able to deliver native IPv6, but only tunnels.

Make sure that all equipment and system software supports IPv6. Examples of external systems that must support IPv6:

Firewalls – Many leading suppliers of firewalls have support for IPv6. If you are bound by long contracts for firewalls that only support IPv4, purchase an additional firewall. Place it in parallell to the old one and run all IPv6 in it. You will not need the same extensive set of rules or performance in a separate firewall, if it only runs IPv6! For SEK 10,000, you will have a firewall to start with and learn from.

Web servers – Most systems in the market are IPv6 compatible. The web is ideal as a first service! Google has been testing IPv6 for a number of years by making its ordinary search service available over IPv6, although at another address: http://ipv6.google.com. A company can do the same. This has minimal impact on the existing operating environment, yet provides an opportunity to test and learn the new protocol.

E-mail systems – Many companies today perform some form of filtering of e-mail for spam and virus before allowing it to enter internal systems. Demand that all e-mail servers that receive your e-mail from others must also accept IPv6 for incoming and outgoing e-mail.

Operating systems – Believe it or not, but Microsoft is a shining star with respect to support for IPv6 and is clearly ahead of the open-source operating systems based on Linux and BSD. Above all, Windows Vista and Windows 7 are excellent examples of systems with full IPv6 support, but even the older Windows XP handles IPv6 relatively well! It may be a good idea for the IT department to begin testing and using IPv6 so that they gain experience prior to a broader roll-out.

DNS – To be able to show the rest of the Internet that your services can be accessed via IPv6, your DNS must naturally identify the services that have IPv6 addresses. However, the DNS servers themselves should also be accessible via IPv6. If you have DNS servers with your ISP or elsewhere, check with them if they are ready, and if not, consider using another supplier that is!

Start training Only short training is required to start IPv6, in our opinion. If you know IPv4, it is easy to get started with IPv6! And getting started will build experience—that is something you can not get from classes! A good idea is to gather personnel from several municipalities or the public authorities with which you work and bring in an experienced technician to hold practical workshops to warm you up before investing major sums in training. Training always works best if you have some prior knowledge!

Other infrastructure that needs attention

DNSSEC – We naturally focus on IPv6, since that is one of our main interests. However, there are several extremely important areas where the public sector could take the lead. One of them is a more secure infrastructure for DNS, which is commonly known as DNSSEC. A few years ago, a researcher showed how easy it is to redirect a user wishing to access a given website or e-mail server to another malicious one. Today, upgrades have made this a little more difficult, but it is still possible. DNSSEC with DNS operators, companies and ISPs, this loophole would be closed. Once again, the standard has been in place for some time, but introduction has been slow.

E-identification – Important decisions also remain to be taken regarding e-identification. The model that has been in use in Sweden for a number of years suffers from several deficiencies. It is important to place requirements on the system so that it,

is based on open standards,
provides full protection for personal integrity,
is technology-neutral and
is available to all players in all parts of society.

The roles of registrars and issuers of identification should also be made clear and separated. Today's system also suffers from the fact that only private persons can identify themselves. Companies, authorities and associations should naturally also be able to identify themselves! In this context, it is important that the government opens its databases in a manner that not only creates opportunities, but also protects integrity.

Am I already running IPv6? Modern operating systems have IPv6 activated by default. This means that you may already be running IPv6 via an automatic tunnel service without knowing it! Test towards http://test.ipv6.tk and you will see if you are running IPv6 or not! The results may vary with the same computer if you are at work or at home, depending on firewalls and other equipment.

Conclusion? The pages http://www.kommunermedipv6.se and http://www.myndighetermedipv6.se show that very little is happening, unfortunately. There must be a demand from above for the public sector to prioritize this in its IT operations. At the same time, this is not a monumental task! It is a matter of working days per agency, not several man years.

Written by Torbjörn Eklöv, CTO, Senior Network Architect, DNSSEC/IPv6

Film over internet en internet exchanges

2010-02-09T11:12:00.000+01:00

Niet specifiek over IPv6, maar toch interessant:

After releasing the initial version of the the Internet Revealed at RIPE59 in Lisbon last year, we received some valuable feedback from the wider IXP community. We took this feedback to the producers of the film and now have a slightly edited version 2.0 of the film.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a5837LcDHfE

Enjoy

Serge Radovcic
Euro-IX

NAT64 + DNS64 voor BSD en Linux

2010-02-09T09:31:00.000+01:00

Ecdysis is aimed to develop an open-source implementation of a NAT64 gateway to run on open-source operating systems such as Linux and BSD. The gateway is comprised of two distinct modules: the DNS ALG and the IP translator. The DNS ALG is implemented in two DNS open-source server: Unbound and Bind. The IP translator is implemented in Linux as kernel module using Netfilter faclities and in openBSD as a modification of PF.

Ecdysis conforms to the following specifications:

This project is funded by the NLnet Foundation and Viagénie.

Bron: Ecdysis

Strato-klanten dit jaar over op IPv6

2010-02-08T13:56:00.001+01:00

Gebruikers met een shared hostingpakket bij Strato zijn nog voor het einde van dit jaar bereikbaar via IPv6. Eind vorig jaar werden al de dedicated hostingservers naar het nieuwe internetprotocol omgeschakeld.

Dat is de belangrijkste boodschap die de Duitse hostingprovider deze week tijdens een Europese bijeenkomst heeft aangekondigd. Strato werkt al twee jaar aan de voorbereiding van IPv6, zegt René Wienholtz, CIO en CTO bij Strato. “Het bleek erg lastig om alle diensten die we bij de webhostingpakketten aanbieden, gereed te maken voor IPv6. Zo is er bijvoorbeeld maar weinig statistiekensoftware beschikbaar die IPv6-bezoekers kan meten.”

De verwachting is dat alle shared hostingpakketten voor het einde van 2010 via IPv6 bereikbaar zijn. Deze sites, waarvan het grootste deel bestaat uit consumenten en kleine bedrijven, draaien in het Strato-datacenter in Karlsrühe.

De dedicated server-klanten, die draaien in het datacenter in Berlijn, krijgen ondersteuning bij het configureren van het /56-IPv6-subnetwerk en de adressen. Zij kunnen op hun server meerdere diensten met IPv6-adressen draaien zoals een webserver, mail en ftp. Strato benadrukt dat het geen extra kosten berekent voor het invoeren en het gebruik van IPv6. “Het is een technologie die noodzakelijk is omdat de IPv4-adressen opraken, dus waarom zou de klant daarvoor moeten betalen”, reageert Wienholtz.

Behoefte
Een snelle overgang naar IPv6 is geen overbodige luxe. Volgens Strato-directeur Damian Schmidt, groeit de vraag naar domeinnamen en hostingpakketten nog altijd. Dit is te verklaren door de manier waarop mensen zich – al dan niet professioneel – op internet willen presenteren. “Uit onze klantgegevens blijkt dat jongeren tot 26 jaar vooral sociale netwerksites gebruiken om zich online te presenteren, want dat is gratis. Ouderen zijn eerder bereid te betalen voor een domeinnaam dat eventueel is gekoppeld met een hostingpakket”, aldus Schmidt.

Daarnaast is er een verandering opgetreden in de markt. “We zijn gegaan van webhosting (lees: publiceren) naar hosting in een breder zinsverband (zichtbare data op het web)”, vertelt Schmidt. “Dit komt omdat de behoeften van internetters zijn veranderd. Mensen willen nu bijvoorbeeld ook hun familiefoto’s veilig ergens online bewaren omdat ze die dreigen te verliezen als hun computer kapot gaat.”

Virtuele disk
Vorig jaar introduceerde Strato in Duitsland daarom al een dienst waarbij particulieren en bedrijven virtuele schijfruimte van 100 GB tot 5 TB kunnen krijgen. Deze dienst zal ook in Nederland worden aangeboden, maar waarschijnlijk pas in 2011.

Verder introduceert de provider deze zomer nog in Nederland een dienst waarbij klanten een virtueel datacenter binnen Strato krijgen. Deze dienst heet Multiserver en biedt een dedicated server met virtualisatiesoftware en native IPv6-ondersteuning zonder NAT of tunneling.

Bron: ISPam

IPv6, waarom al die moeite?

2010-01-22T09:32:00.000+01:00

U weet het waarschijnlijk al, de internetadressen raken op. Als we IPv4 (Internet Protocol versie 4) blijven gebruiken, zijn we dit jaar of volgend jaar door de 4,3 miljard domeinregistraties heen, aldus VeriSign.

Wat is hiervan de oorzaak? Voor een groot deel danken we het tekort aan IP-ruimte aan de grootschalige acceptatie van webapplicaties en -diensten, waaronder draadloze apparaten, IP-telefonie en gameconsoles.

Gelukkig is daar IPv6. ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) is verantwoordelijk voor het oude en voor dit nieuwe internetadressysteem. Deze organisatie is al begonnen IPv6-format op zijn rootservers te zetten om de huidige IPv4-standaard te vervangen. IPv6 zal niet alleen veel minder grenzen kennen dan IPv4, het systeem zal ook de routingaggregatie en automatische adresconfiguratie vereenvoudigen. Daarnaast verhoogt het de mobiliteit, veiligheid en betrouwbaarheid.

De overgang van IPv4 naar IPv6 maakt de klus van netwerkbeheerders wel wat ingewikkelder. De gehele wereld gaat niet in een keer over naar IPv6. Ook is de overgang niet een kwestie van de schakelaar overhalen voor alle applicaties en apparaten, waarna ze IPv6-compliant zijn. Om hier zonder kleerscheuren doorheen te komen, moeten netwerkbeheerders een slim migratieplan opstellen.

Wat zijn de eerste twee stappen van een migratieplan?

1. De netwerkbeheerder maakt een inventarisatie van de huidige netwerk-, systeem-, applicatie- en managementomgeving. Ondersteunen ze al IPv6? Wat is er nodig om dit te implementeren? Is er een upgrade beschikbaar? Moet er hard- of software worden vervangen? Welke onderdelen ondersteunen een dual stack, dus IPv4 en IPv6 tegelijkertijd? Welke onderdelen ondersteunen single stack, dus alleen IPv4 of alleen IPv6?

2. Na de inventarisatie is een toekomstvast adresplan (voor de komende tien à twintig jaar) onderdeel van het migratieplan. Neem hier dus ruim de tijd voor en denk niet: ‘er zijn toch genoeg adressen’.

Netwerkbeheerders hebben twee mogelijke migratiestrategieën tot hun beschikking.

1. Ze migreren hun klanten naar IPv6. In de tussentijd houden ze hun servers op IPv4. Zo’n volksverhuizing betekent in de praktijk, dat praktisch elke klant ‘door de handen’ gaat van de netwerkbeheerder. Hij moet zorgen dat de klanten via IPv6-paden kunnen communiceren met het netwerk.

2. Ze migreren de servers naar IPv6, terwijl ze hun klanten in een IPv4-omgeving houden. Het gevaar hiervan is ‘applicatieafhankelijkheid’ die in potentie iedere gebruiker gelijktijdig raakt als er iets misgaat.

Welke strategie een organisatie ook kiest, ze moet een migratieplan op de plank hebben liggen. Naast de strategie draagt overigens de keuze van tools in belangrijke mate bij aan het succes van de migratie van IPv4 naar IPv6. Deze tools moeten probleemloos werken tussen twee netwerken. Ze moeten een organisatie de vrijheid geven om de bestaande infrastructuur te testen en te migreren in een gecontroleerde snelheid, zonder kostbare aanpassingen aan applicaties te hoeven uitvoeren voor ondersteuning van IPv6.

Uiteraard is het nodig om de IPv4- en IPv6-netwerkomgevingen te koppelen. De netwerkbeheerder kan de systemen die een dual stack ondersteunen, direct op beide netwerken aansluiten. Alle andere systemen sluit hij aan op IPv4 of IPv6. Hier is het nodig om een IPv4/IPv6-gateway in te zetten. Door gebruik te maken van zo’n gateway, is het mogelijk de overgang naar een volledig IPv6-netwerk gefaseerd en gecontroleerd door te voeren.

Veel organisaties aarzelen om een migratie in gang te zetten. De belangrijkste reden is, dat ze de voordelen voor hun bedrijf niet goed kunnen overzien. Of ze denken dat een upgrade te duur zal zijn en te tijdrovend voor de magere ROI. Ze hebben wel een punt: er is inderdaad geen eenvoudige manier om de bedrijfsvoordelen te meten. Maar vooruitstrevende organisaties zien meteen de nieuwe kansen die een migratie met zich meebrengt.

Bedrijven worden steeds internationaler, hun medewerkers steeds mobieler en hun infrastructuur steeds complexer. Daarom stijgt het aantal applicaties, hardware en diensten dat verloopt via hun netwerk, exponentieel. Voor deze organisaties is de schade niet te overzien als de IPv4-adressenbron opdroogt en geen enkel onderdeel van de netwerkinfrastructuur IPv6-compatibel is. Als een netwerk het begeeft, zal dit grote kosten met zich meebrengen. Sterker nog, het kan een organisatie pootje lichten. Laat het niet zo ver komen.

Bron: ComputerWorld

APNIC: IPv6 adoption delay could create costs

2010-01-21T11:01:00.000+01:00

The accelerating decline of IPv4 address space could end up increasing the cost of Internet access unless the industry speeds up the migration to IPv6 in the near future, according to Asia Pacific Network Information Centre (APNIC) chief scientist, Geoff Huston.

The official representative of the five regional bodies that oversee distribution of Internet number resources — the Number Resource Organization (NRO) — has announced the remaining allocation of IPv4 addresses had dropped below 10 per cent.

IPv6 is a long-awaited next generation Internet Protocol that uses a 128-bit addressing scheme that will provide billions of IP addresses. It is promoted as the replacement for the existing communications protocol IPv4, which uses 32-bit addresses and can support about 4 billion IP addresses.

According to Huston, the decline in IPv4 address availability is largely driven by the Asia-Pacific region's economic strength and increasing mobile Internet use.

"The global recovery is putting pressure on the IPv4 address pool, no doubt," Huston told Computerworld. "We don't have much time to run no matter what. The current estimates are that the central pool, which is a global pool, will have handed out its last address block to one of the regional operators by September of next year, which is probably going to be APNIC.

"Interestingly, APNIC is responsible for almost half of the IP address allocations that are happening in the world. Part of that is because some of the Asian economies, particularly China and its build-out of infrastructure, which includes not only railways and bridges but also Internet, is proceeding at a pretty incredible pace. What that means for the rest of the world is that predictions on when it exhausts is remaining constant, if not accelerating slightly."

In Australia, 2.6 million new IPv4 addresses were handed out in 2009. Canada and the Netherlands allocated 2 million each and the USA allocated 38 million. Each of these markets represent mature Internet users and Huston contends the continuing rise in smartphones, such as the iPhone and other mobile devices, will put pressure on IPv4.

"It's not that there won't be addresses [IPv4] to be had, but the price will make folks' eyes water," he said. "Because the only source of addresses will be someone who already has them and, in a market where scarcity dominates, you start to get an entirely different pricing structure."

If service providers and manufacturers aren't able to supply IPv6 addresses or enabled equipment, the cost of obtaining an existing IPv4 address will likely be passed onto end users.

"The ISP will have to buy addresses on a market that has gone mad. One view would be we are all sophisticated buyers and this would be just fine. But anyone who remembers the auctioning of GSM spectrum would remember it caused a couple of companies to go broke as they handled the auctions so badly," Huston said.

APNIC and its associated bodies have lobbied the ICT industry, government and supply chains to ramp up the move to IPv6 for some time.

ISPs, however, have been reluctant to move across to IPv6. Late last year Internode began trialling IPv6 services in native mode on its national ADSL network but many other ISPs told Computerworld they have no intention of running IPv6 trials in the short term.

A recent survey commissioned by the European Commission also found that about 92 per cent of ISPs are either not using IPv6 or report little IPv6 traffic on their network.

While there are ways to continue using IPv4, such as with the deployment of network address translators (NATs) into ISP networks, Huston argued such measures are only stop-gap approaches and it would be better to move to IPv6 for long-term Internet stability.

He added each part of the Internet ecosystem, from the ISP to the consumer, needed to look at promoting the adoption of IPv6 to ensure preparedness.

"Fixing cars by watching them crash is a pretty lousy way to run an industry," he said, referring to the lack of trials to date. "We need to avoid the carnage and prepare before we see these problems."

IANA IPv4 Address Pool Dips Below 10%

2010-01-20T09:15:00.002+01:00

Dear Colleagues,

With the distribution of two /8 blocks to APNIC, the Number Resource Organization (NRO) today announced that less than ten percent of available IPv4 addresses remain unallocated.

“This is a key milestone in the growth and development of the global Internet,” noted Axel Pawlik, Chairman of the NRO. “With less than ten percent of the entire IPv4 address range still available for allocation to RIRs, it is vital that the Internet community take considered and determined action to ensure the global adoption of
IPv6. The limited IPv4 addresses will not allow us enough resources to achieve the ambitions we all hold for global Internet access. The deployment of IPv6 is a key infrastructure development that will enable the network to support the billions of people and devices that will connect in the coming years.”

You can view the NRO press release in its entirety at:
http://www.nro.net/media/less-than-10-percent-ipv4-addresses-remain-unallocated.html

Please contact <ncc@ripe.net> if you have any questions or comments.

Regards,

Paul Rendek
Head of External Relations and Communications
RIPE NCC

Bedrijven schuiven invoering IPv6 voor zich uit

2010-01-15T14:23:00.000+01:00

Twee op de drie Nederlandse organisaties zijn niet op tijd klaar voor de overstap op IPv6. Dat blijkt uit het jaarlijkse onderzoek van netwerkspecialist Axians naar de invoering van de nieuwe generatie IP-adressen. Slechts eenderde van de ondervraagde bedrijven maakt al gebruik van IPv6, of is van plan dit binnen twaalf maanden te gaan doen. Volgens Axians is de vertraging voor een deel te wijten aan de crisis.

De netwerkleverancier hield het onderzoek tijdens hun 'IP Managementdag' in september onder 75 netwerkbeheerders. Vorig jaar voorspelde het bedrijf dat iets meer dan de helft van de Nederlandse organisaties niet op tijd klaar is voor de invoering van IPv6. Inmiddels is dat aandeel toegenomen tot 67 procent.

'Uitstel is geen optie'
In november meldde onderzoeksbureau TNO dat er nog onvoldoende ipv6-modems op de markt zijn en dat deze bovendien te duur zijn. Volgens managing director Rob Wennekendonk van Axians is uitstel geen optie: 'Wie de komende twaalf maanden nog niet investeert in apparatuur die IPv6 ondersteunt, zal tot 2012 worden geconfronteerd met veel extra kosten. Het is verstandiger om deze te spreiden over de komende periode, door alleen nog apparatuur aan te schaffen die klaar is voor IPv6.'Hoewel voorspellingen over het precieze moment uiteenlopen, wordt verwacht dat de voorraad IPv4-adressen in de loop van 2010 opraakt.

Lees meer op: Computable

Ubuntu Karmic IPv6 probleem opgelost?

2010-01-13T15:40:00.002+01:00

Een update voor Ubuntu Karmic lost mogelijk een IPv6 bugs op. Zie ook deze discussie.

Ideeen voor IPv6 subnetten

2010-01-13T15:39:00.000+01:00

Martijn Bellaard heeft een artikel geschreven over het opzetten van een IPv6 nummerplan.

QNAP Turbo NAS

2010-01-13T15:36:00.000+01:00

De TS-259 Pro Turbo NAS van QNAP ondersteunt IPv6. Zie de specificaties op de QNAP website.

The Road To IPv6 Is Paved With NATs

2010-01-07T15:05:00.002+01:00

Even though IPv6 adoption is dangerously slow, we will see adoption eventually. There are three main sections of the Internet that need to handle IPv6. The Internet networking equipment like routers, proxies and firewalls, and services like DNS and routing need to support IPv6 so that clients can talk to servers that users are connecting to from giants like Google and Amazon to smaller web, email and other hosts. Then, there are the enterprise and consumer products that will connect to Internet hosts. The question remains how to deliver IPv6 services in a non-disruptive manner to consumers in homes, small businesses and enterprises, all of whom can't control either the content being provided or the consumers visiting that content.

Lees de rest op NetworkComputing

Zal IPv6 voor een drastische verandering zorgen in 2010

2010-01-05T14:24:00.000+01:00

AMSTERDAM, 20100105 -- Het is voorspeld dat we in 2012, of eerder, geen IPv4 adressen meer beschikbaar hebben. Daardoor wordt het internet Protocol versie 4 (IPv4) langzaam vervangen door de volgende generatie, versie IPv6. Omdat antispam meters ondermeer afhangen van IP reputatie checks, komt de vraag naar boven hoe dit invloed zal hebben op de mail inbox.

Het verschil tussen IPv4 and IPv6 is erg klein. Ipv6 is simpelweg een ander formaat van karakters dat ervoor zorgt dat er veel meer verschillende mogelijkheden zijn voor de samenstelling van adressen. Hierdoor zal het eeuwen duren voordat we hier doorheen zijn. "Veel anti spam systemen zijn gebaseerd op de reputatie van de zender door de evaluatie van het voorgaande verkeer van een IP adres. Bij IPv6 daarentegen, aangezien er zoveel verschillende IP adressen zijn, is filteren op dit niveau niet meer mogelijk. De welbekende 'blacklist' zoals wij dat nu kennen, zullen verdwijnen en de 'whitelist' wordt erg populair ", volgens Dreas van Donselaar van het Nederlandse email security concern SpamExperts.

SpamExperts werkt samen met diverse Nederlandse ISPs om een mail server registratie whitelist voor de IPv6 adressen te verplichten. Dhr. Van Donselaar geeft ook aan dat naast whitelisting het erg belangrijk is om een accurate email content filter te gebruiken om te vermijden dat filtering alleen afhankelijk is van de IP reputatie. "We hebben een SpamFeed ontwikkeld dat andere anti spam bedrijven zal ondersteunen om hun content scanning technologie te verbeteren". Ook al lijkt IPv6 heel ver weg, het komt sneller dichterbij dan we denken en zal serieuze consequenties hebben voor iedereen die geen voorbereidingen getroffen heeft.

Wat is IPv6 eigenlijk? In plaats van de Ipv4 samenstelling van een IP adres in 4 sets van 3, dat ons toestaat om 4 biljoen adressen te creëren, worden 16 karakters gebruikt voor IPv6, dat ons toestaat om oneindig veel combinaties te vormen. Helaas is niet iedereen zo enthousiast over de implementatie van IPv6. Deels is dit te wijten aan de economische crisis; bedrijven lijken de implementatie uit te stellen omdat hier hoge kosten aan verbonden zijn.

Bron: SpamExperts (via Nieuwsbank)

Hoe win je een IPv6 Award

2009-12-22T01:09:00.000+01:00

BIT, de winnaar van de IPv6 Award voor Internet Service Providers, legt uit hoe zij deze prijs hebben gewonnen: weblog.bit.nl

Serious Request IPv6 streams (3Mbit!)

2009-12-21T13:38:00.001+01:00

Goedenavond,

Vanwege de positieve reacties op de Tour de France IPv6 stream, eerder dit jaar, hebben we ook voor Serious Request de streams via IPv6 beschikbaar gemaakt.

De meerwaarde van de IPv6 streams zit hem in de zogenaamde "main" stream. Deze is, in tegenstelling tot de standaard stream, opgeschaald naar 3Mbit/s.

De streams zijn via de volgende links te bekijken.

http://www.omroep.nl/live/ipv6/3fm_sr2009_main.asx
http://www.omroep.nl/live/ipv6/3fm_sr2009_brievenbus.asx
http://www.omroep.nl/live/ipv6/3fm_sr2009_cam1.asx
http://www.omroep.nl/live/ipv6/3fm_sr2009_djcam.asx
http://www.omroep.nl/live/ipv6/3fm_sr2009_buitenshot.asx

Omroep.nl zelf is helaas nog niet IPv6 ready.

Met vriendelijke groet,

--
Bart Poort
Streaming Media Engineer
NPO ICT

The Future Of the Internet: European Comission Survey Shows Lack Of Leadership

2009-12-09T15:26:00.000+01:00

A recent survey highlighted an alarming lack of leadership regarding Internet development, with organisations in both the public and private sectors burying their heads in the sand when it comes to the need to adopt IPv6.

All devices linked to the Internet are assigned a number enabling them to connect to other devices on the network. These numbers, or Internet protocol (IP) addresses, are critical for the operation of the Internet.

The biggest threat facing the Internet today is that we’re running out of IP version 4 (or IPv4) addresses, which are used to connect the majority of devices to the network. Very soon, the pool of unassigned IPv4 addresses will shrink to less than 10 per cent, and it’s been estimated that the pool of unallocated addresses will be completely depleted by 2011. The global adoption of IPv6 is vital to ensuring that IPv4 exhaustion does not adversely affect growth or innovation in the Internet industry.

The explosive growth of the Internet and rapid adoption of networked digital devices worldwide has led to this IPv4 address exhaustion. Yet, the EC survey found that many organisations are still not ready for the transition to IPv6. The survey, conducted in cooperation with the membership base of RIPE NCC, the Regional Internet Registry (RIR) that supports the infrastructure of the Internet in Europe, Middle East and parts of central Asia, found that only 17 per cent of organisations have plans for IPv6 adoption.

Alarmingly, the EC’s study suggests that Europe is lagging behind the rest of the world when it comes to IPv6 deployment. Only 30 per cent of EU organisations polled were concerned about the implications of IPv4 depletion, while almost half (48 per cent) of organisations from outside of the EU recognised that the shortage of IPv4 addresses poses a threat for Internet development. Furthermore, according to the survey, only about a half (53 per cent) of government organisations within the EU are considering adopting IPv6.

The Internet community has been aware of IPv4 depletion for over a decade and developed IPv6 in the mid-1990s to meet future demand. Unlike IPv4 addresses, whose 32-bit format provides 4,294,967,296 unique addresses, the 128-bit format of IPv6 allows for a total of roughly a trillion trillion trillion addresses, enough to meet the demands of continuing Internet development and innovation.

EU organisations’ general lack of urgency in adopting IPv6 could leave the region lagging behind the rest of the world when it comes to Internet development, hampering their ability to compete in the global marketplace. Failure to adopt IPv6 on time also has the potential to hamper socio-economic growth, as the Internet will be unable to sustain the growing number of devices and users connecting to the network, and these users, in turn, could become digitally excluded. To protect a sustainable growth of the digital economy in Europe and beyond, government organisations need to lead by example and deploy IPv6.

It won’t be long before most governments will have swapped paper-based processes to online forms and services - activities such as filing taxes via a website will soon become the norm. If government organisations fail to make their services accessible via IPv6, many members of the public may be unable to access vital public services as their computer won’t be able to connect with the government’s IPv4-only network.

Government organisations cannot act alone on IPv6. They need to work together with the technical community and the private sector. They need to use the power they hold as major procurers of technology and help persuade vendors to develop and market IPv6 compatible hardware and software. They also need to adopt an active role in the policy making processes that impact on the infrastructure of the Internet. The Internet community, including RIPE, ICANN, the Internet Society (ISOC) and the NRO actively encourage government organisations to join in these policy discussions.

The uptake of IPv6 addresses has so far been slow, but the Internet is mission critical for all organisations and a fundamental utility for a globally connected community. It is vital that government organisations and the private sector make it a priority to accelerate adoption of IPv6 worldwide. By working together with commercial organisations and the Internet community, government organisations can ensure that everyone will be able to benefit from the growth of the digital economy now and in the years to come.

Bron: eGov monitor

Company boards must stop dawdling over IPv6

2009-12-09T15:24:00.003+01:00

Given how close we are to exhausting the supply of IPv4 addresses, it is incomprehensible that so many businesses are still not preparing for the transition to IPv6, says Axel Pawlik.

It has been estimated that before the end of 2011, the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (Iana), the organisation responsible for the top-level distribution of IP addresses, will hand out the last unallocated IPv4 addresses to the five regional internet registries (RIRs).

A European Commission survey, conducted in co-operation with the membership base of Ripe NCC, the RIR that supports the infrastructure of the internet in Europe, Middle East and parts of central Asia, found only 17 percent of businesses in its region have plans for IPv6 adoption.

Even ISPs seem to have their heads in the sand, as 92 percent have reported insignificant IPv6 traffic, or have no IPv6 in use at all.

Threat to development
Moreover, it seems Europe is lagging behind the rest of the world when it comes to IPv6 deployment. Only 30 percent of EU organisations polled were concerned by the implications of IPv4 depletion, while almost half of organisations polled outside the EU recognised that the shortage of IPv4 addresses poses a threat for internet development.

The lack of urgency among European organisations in adopting IPv6 could leave the region behind the rest of the world when it comes to internet development, hampering its ability to compete in the global market.

The internet community has been aware of IPv4 depletion for more than a decade. Recognising that a new protocol was required to meet future demand, the technical community developed IPv6, the next-generation of IP addresses, in the mid-1990s.

Unlike IPv4 addresses, whose 32-bit format provides 4,294,967,296 unique addresses, IPv6 has a longer format, allowing for a total of roughly a trillion trillion trillion addresses — enough to meet the demands of continuing internet development and innovation.

The 128-bit IPv6 addresses are not backward-compatible, so routers and other hardware, as well as network management software running on the 32-bit IPv4, will not be able to recognise IPv6 traffic.

Website access
Those circumstances mean that if your content and services are available only over IPv4, a partner, potential customer or other key stakeholder using IPv6 will not even be able to access your website. To overcome this issue, there is every likelihood organisations will need to 'dual-stack' — deploy IPv6 and run it alongside IPv4 — to ensure ubiquitous access.

While many IT directors and technology decision-makers are up to speed on the IP-address depletion issues and what might be done to overcome these challenges, there is very little understanding among more general senior management and board executives.

It is vital that a wider swathe of management understands the issues now. If they leave it too late to come to terms with the threat to this critical resource, the inevitable result will be knee-jerk decision-making.

Some businesses see delaying IPv6 deployment as a sound cost-cutting strategy, but that position is shortsighted. The available pool of IPv4 address space is quickly approaching the final 10 percent, and it is clear that the internet-wide adoption of IPv6 is inevitable.

No matter what sector you operate in, delaying investment in IPv6 will probably result in greater spending down the road, with last-minute deployment and poor planning leading to increased costs.

Global internet economy
IPv6 adoption is not only a means for individual organisations to safeguard connectivity, communication and commerce now and in the years to come — it is essential for the development of the global internet economy.

If businesses fail to adopt IPv6 on time, socio-economic growth could stall because the internet will be unable to sustain a growing amount of devices and users connecting to the network, who in turn could become digitally excluded.

The uptake of IPv6 addresses has so far been slow, but it is paramount that ISPs, governments and private-sector organisations make accelerated adoption a priority. After all, the internet is mission-critical for all organisations and a fundamental utility for the globally connected community.

Axel Pawlik is managing director of the Ripe NCC, an independent not-for-profit organisation that supports the infrastructure of the internet for Europe, the Middle East and parts of central Asia. While at the University of Dortmund, Pawlik contributed to the establishment of Unix networking as a publicly available service in Germany. He also founded EUnet Deutschland GmbH, developing it into one of the strongest EUnet networks in Europe.

Bron: ZDNet

Microsoft: The Argument against Disabling IPv6

2009-11-25T10:55:00.000+01:00

It is unfortunate that some organizations disable IPv6 on their computers running Windows Vista or Windows Server 2008, where it is installed and enabled by default. Many disable IPv6-based on the assumption that they are not running any applications or services that use it. Others might disable it because of a misperception that having both IPv4 and IPv6 enabled effectively doubles their DNS and Web traffic. This is not true.

From Microsoft's perspective, IPv6 is a mandatory part of the Windows operating system and it is enabled and included in standard Windows service and application testing during the operating system development process. Because Windows was designed specifically with IPv6 present, Microsoft does not perform any testing to determine the effects of disabling IPv6. If IPv6 is disabled on Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008, or later versions, some components will not function. Moreover, applications that you might not think are using IPv6—such as Remote Assistance, HomeGroup, DirectAccess, and Windows Mail—could be.

Therefore, Microsoft recommends that you leave IPv6 enabled, even if you do not have an IPv6-enabled network, either native or tunneled. By leaving IPv6 enabled, you do not disable IPv6-only applications and services (for example, HomeGroup in Windows 7 and DirectAccess in Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 are IPv6-only) and your hosts can take advantage of IPv6-enhanced connectivity.

Bron: Microsoft TechNet

Tien redenen om niet te investeren in IPv6

2009-11-23T10:42:00.001+01:00

IPv6 wordt vaak als een techniek gezien die we voorlopig niet nodig hebben. Toch zijn de meeste argumenten om niet te investeren in kennis van IPv6 gebaseerd op statements die vraagtekens oproepen. In dit artikel volgen tien statements die regelmatig gehoord worden als het gaat om het invoeren van IPv6. Oordeel zelf.

Lees het hele artikel: Computable

The ITU and IPv6 Transition: Controversy at the IGF

2009-11-19T15:09:00.000+01:00

At today's "Managing Critical Internet Resources” session of the Internet Governance Forum 2009, the ITU agenda on taking a role in IPv6 distribution once again reared its ugly head. In a heated exchange, Professor Dr Sureswaran Ramadass, the Director of Nav6 an ITU consultant/fanboy squared off with the new ICANN CEO about competition in IPv6 address distribution. It seems clear that the ITU hasn't given up their hope of becoming a player in distributing IPv6 addresses to their members.

His question, setting off the contretemps, was "Since there are so many IPv6 addresses, why can't we have additional organisations giving it out?" (start at about the 53rd minute of this video)
The answer, of course, is that we CAN have additional organisations, but we SHOULD NOT. There is a policy in place for developing emerging RIRs, the ITU however just doesn't meet the criteria.

These criteria were conveniently summarized for the ICANN Stockholm meeting
I doubt that the ITU could get any objective observer to think that they could meet these criteria, unless they radically changed their way of working of course, which isn't likely.

The reasons we SHOULD NOT have multiple RIRs per continent are various. The first is that RFC2050 (BCP 12) calls for a relatively small number of RIRs, and that they be of continental dimension. Another reason is that it would promote de-aggregation leading to greater bloat of routing tables. In addition, having the ITU set up a registry (or registries) to compete with the existing RIRs would lead to what is known as "RIR shopping". In other words, if a provider didn't like something about the policies set by an RIR community, they could go to an ITU IPv6 registry. This is exactly what Ramadass seems to want. This is generally seen as a very bad idea in the global IP addressing community, as RIR shopping is seen as a way to circumvent the Bottom Up, Transparent, Open, Consensus driven (my acronym for this is BUTOC) way that RIR communities make IP address policies.

The biggest applause of the whole exchange was saved for Dr. Nii Quaynor, the Dean of the African networking community, when he pointed out that he was very happy with the way the RIR system works, as it allows Africans to set their own policies in an open and transparent way, and this multistakeholder self determination is a positive step in development, and any change in this way of collective working is not in the interest of Africa, developing countries, or in the interest of a single Internet.

Bron: CircleID

RIPE NCC Launches IPv6 Implementation Guide

2009-11-19T15:05:00.000+01:00

The RIPE NCC, the Regional Internet Registry (RIR) for Europe, the Middle East and parts of Central Asia today launches How to Act Now, a resource to help business and government representatives plan and execute IPv6 deployment. This is the first tool of its kind to focus on deploying IPv6 in a real-world, business environment.

How to Act Now includes expert advice, video clips, and hints and tips on all aspects of planning and implementing IPv6 within your network, no matter how large or small. The content addresses the questions and challenges faced by business and technical representatives from large enterprises, small businesses, ISPs and government organisations when adopting IPv6.

IPv6 (Internet Protocol version six) is the latest version of the Internet addressing protocol. All devices connected to the Internet need an IP address in order to connect to other devices in the network. The majority of the Internet is currently run on IPv4, but only about ten per cent of the address space now remains unallocated. Adoption of IPv6 is vital to enable new users and devices to connect to the Internet.

Organisations that delay IPv6 adoption may face increased costs due to poor procurement planning and rushed deployment. Failure to ensure that all devices and networks are IPv6 compatible could lead to problems communicating with other Internet users and inhibit access to online content and services.

"With most estimates putting IPv4 exhaustion only two years away, at best, it is clear that concerted action on IPv6 deployment is necessary to ensure the stability of the Internet and its continued growth," comments Axel Pawlik, Managing Director of the RIPE NCC. "Failure to deploy IPv6 ahead of the exhaustion of IPv4 addresses is one of the biggest threats facing the Internet today." "With How to Act Now, the RIPE NCC aims to help all organisations, from governments and vendors to ISPs and telcos, to put the adoption and integration of IPv6 at the top of their technology agenda. Deployment of new technology takes time, and as the point of IPv4 exhaustion looms ever closer, time will be the one luxury that we as an industry no longer have."

Nominaties IPv6 Awards bekend

2009-11-18T13:41:00.002+01:00

Leidschendam, 18 november 2009 - Vandaag heeft de Jury van de IPv6 Awards de genomineerden voor de IPv6 Awards bekendgemaakt. Deze Awards zijn in het leven geroepen om extra aandacht te vragen voor de noodzakelijke overstap van IPv4 naar IPv6. Bedrijven en instellingen die IPv6 succesvol hebben geïmplementeerd hebben zich kunnen aanmelden voor een Award. De uitreiking van de IPv6 Awards vindt plaats op 26 november aanstaande tijdens het Jaarcongres ECP-EPN.

De genomineerden zijn:

Categorie	Genomineerden
Bedrijfsleven	NetMatch, Watchmouse
Overheid & Not-for-profit	Stichting DOK, Nederlandse Publieke omroep, Ministerie van Algemene zaken
Onderwijs	Hogeschool Utrecht, Universiteit van Amsterdam
Publicatie	Benjamin Margarita, Arnout Veenman, Marcel van de Kraats
Particulieren	Jasper Wonnink, Koos van de Hout
Internet Service Providers	BIT, Signet, Shock Media, Prolocation

Bij het selecteren van de genomineerden heeft de jury gelet op motivatie, relevantie, toewijding, implementatie en impact.

De Task Force IPv6 die de Awards heeft ingesteld is tevreden over het aantal aanmeldingen. "Dit jaar hebben we maarliefst 29 aanmeldingen ontvangen. Dit is een forse stijging ten opzichte van vorig jaar. We zijn blij te kunnen constateren dat de implementatie van IPv6 op gang komt en de prioriteit van IPv6 in Nederland is gestegen," aldus Erik Huizer, voorzitter van de Task Force IPv6.

De prijzen voor de Award winnaars worden ter beschikking gesteld door SIDN, SURFnet, Stratix, Stichting NL net, XS4all en KPN. De prijzen lopen uiteen van geldbedragen tot 15.000 euro, een week lang consultancy en een laptop met een jaar lang mobiel internet.

Noodzakelijke overstap naar IPv6

Door een alsmaar grootschaliger gebruik van het internet raken de huidige adresreeksen op het internet (IPv4) in 2011 op. Om ervoor te zorgen dat dit niet tot problemen leidt is er een nieuw adressysteem, genaamd IPv6, bedacht. Het is belangrijk dat Nederlandse bedrijven, internet service providers, overheden, onderwijsinstellingen en ook particulieren gaan beseffen dat de overstap naar dit nieuwe adressysteem noodzakelijk is en dat zij tijdig maatregelen kunnen en moeten nemen om de overstap naar IPv6 mogelijk te maken (en de kosten onder controle te houden). Goede implementaties van IPv6 kunnen volgens de IPv6 Task Force een voorbeeldfunctie hebben.

Uitreiking IPv6 Awards

De uitreiking van de IPv6 Awards 2009 vindt plaats op 26 november aanstaande tijdens het Jaarcongres ECP-EPN in het Circustheater in Scheveningen. Meer informatie over dit congres is te vinden op www.jaarcongresecp-epn.nl.

Jan 1, 2010 - Time to Get IPv6 Hosts & Networks Working or Turned Off...

2009-11-12T09:49:00.000+01:00

Hieronder een oproep op Facebook van John Curran (de CEO van ARIN, de Amerikaanse tegenhanger van RIPE NCC) aan netwerkbeheerders:

Team -

While many folks are just realizing that they need to enable their public web sites with IPv6 in addition to IPv4, we are now close enough to production usage that we need to change the focus of our efforts from IPv6 Preparation to IPv6 Transition.

In particular, this means that we need to encourage folks to plan out their IPv6 dual-stack enablement efforts and refrain from placing a "AAAA" DNS record out until they're actually prepared to support production traffic.

We need to put a concentrated effort on ensuring the all servers with public facing "AAAA" DNS records are treated as production services to the extent possible.

Similarly, starting January 1, we need to escalate the misconfiguration issues with networks providing IPv6 DHCP support without actually providing some form of IPv6 transit. If you encounter such in a enterprise, campus, wireless or service provider environment, it's time to point out to the administrator/operator that they're actually impacting both IPv4 and IPv6 as a result.

Everyone's efforts in this area are appreciated!
/John

Cisco bereidt carrier producten voor op IPv6-tijdperk

2009-10-21T16:24:00.000+02:00

Ondanks het feit dat IPv4-adressen bijna op zijn, wordt IPv6 op dit moment nog nauwelijks gebruikt. Dat zorgt er voor dat zodra de IPv4-adressen daadwerkelijk op zijn, het gebruik van dual-stack met IPv4 en IPv6 geen oplossing is. Cisco heeft daarom haar carrier producten uitgebreid met oplossingen om netwerken met IPv4 en IPv6 met elkaar te verbinden, meldt InternetNews.com.

Het omschakelen op IPv6 is volgens Mike Capuano, director of service provider marketing of routing and switching solutions bij Cisco, niet zo eenvoudig als het simpelweg inschakelen er van naast IPv4. Dual-stack draaien werkt alleen maar wanneer de migratie naar IPv6 al op zo’n 50% ligt, echter nu IPv6 nog nauwelijks gebruikt wordt, ontstaat er een nieuwe situatie.

In deze nieuwe situatie heb je aan de ene kant een IPv4-adres en aan de andere kant aan IPv6-adres. Cisco heeft daarom voor haar carrier netwerken producten Cisco CRS-1 Carrier Routing System en de Cisco ASR series nieuwe oplossingen geïntroduceerd die het mogelijk maken om IPv4 met IPv6 netwerken met elkaar te verbinden.

Om de bestaande IPv4-infrastructuur met IPv6-netwerken te verbinden heeft Cisco een techniek ontwikkelt genaamd Large-Scale Network Address Translation (LSN). Dit maakt het mogelijk om in het bestaande IPv4-netwerk private IPv4-adressen te gebruiken op carrier-niveau. Daarnaast heeft Cisco ook Address Family Translation (AFT) toegevoegd, waarmee IPv6 verkeer via IPv4 (6-over-4) kan worden getunneld en IPv4 verkeer via IPv6 (4-over-6).

Voor het de Core Routing System (CRS-1) heeft Cisco een nieuwe blade geïntroduceerd genaamd de Carrier-Grade Services Engine. Deze nieuwe blade kan tientallen terabits verkeer afhandelen en honderden miljoenen translations aan.

Volgens Capuano is de overgang naar IPv6 nu een wortel-en-stok-situatie. De stok is het feit dat het aantal met internet verbonden apparaten hand over hand toeneemt. De wortel is de mogelijkheid om nieuwe toepassingen te kunnen gebruiken die gebruik maken van de praktische eindige hoeveelheid IPv6-adressen.

Bron: ISPam

WatchMouse ondersteunt IPv6

2009-10-19T09:42:00.001+02:00

De "Web site performance monitoring" en "Web site and server monitoring" dienst WatchMouse ondersteunt tegenwoordig ook metingen over IPv6. Ook de WatchMouse API ondersteunt IPv6.

AMS-IX ziet voor het eerst 2Gb/s IPv6 verkeer

2009-10-13T13:36:00.000+02:00

Lees hetvolledige bericht op Tweakers of Fix6.

IPv6 - The discussion continues

2009-09-29T14:14:00.000+02:00

It's fascinating what does and doesn't generate discussion among us geeks. Still, we were pleasantly surprised by both the amount of discussion and continued wide range of opinions that our posing the question of the business case for IPv6 brought about. And since some of you may not have visited the discussion pages for the prior two newsletters and continued discussion at the Webtorials Water Cooler, this week's newsletters will summarize some of the comments.

IPv4 vs. IPv6
We'll start with the comments that were in favor of IPv6. One of the first people to comment stated flatly that "I will NEVER buy another router that doesn't support IPv6. One more [garden variety home router]? No thank you! These guys are already losing my business..." This was countered by a statement that many home routers already support IPv6.
Another excellent comment reinforced our contention that IPv6 is more critical for ISPs and vendors than for end users, especially in the immediate future. He stated, "IPv4 addresses will dry up around 2010-2012 - if you're an ISP and your block runs out you'll die even if your customers haven't already abandoned you. And businesses buying router hardware are already starting to require IPv6 support even if they never turn it on, so hardware makers who can't do IPv6 have already lost sales.

"But many end users who can't do IPv6 may take their time to really support it - enough layers of NAT, 6to4 and 4to6 converters and tunnels can let them limp along, and if you've already got an IPv4 address for your Web site, IPv6-only browser users will have a 6to4 NAT somewhere to let them reach you. Expect some ugliness to straggle along for years, but more and more of it will get hidden.
And even in these tough economic times, another person commented that it's time to move forward, stating, "It's not impossible to imagine that that the Internet could continue to exist for thousands of years. The number of addresses in IPv4 is less than the number of bytes of RAM in a typical desktop.
"The 'business case' for IPv6 is for the Internet to continue existing in a usable form. Sticking with IPv4 just means the future network will become ever-crappier, so we might as well just suck it up and fix it now."
Next time, we'll wrap up this discussion with a look at two disparate but interesting aspects – hex code and government mandates.

Bron: Network World

Windows 7 DirectAccess

2009-09-23T15:55:00.002+02:00

Er staat een goed artikel over Windows 2008 / Windows 7 DirectAccess op TechTarget. DirectAccess biedt volledig geintegreerde VPN functionaliteit over IPv6, IPv4 en zelfs HTTPS. Voorwaarde is dat het interne netwerk over IPv6 beschikt.

P2P pushes IPv6 surge

2009-09-15T12:38:00.002+02:00

IPv6 traffic levels surged over the last 12 months, with the 15-fold increase down to just one application and one ISP, according to a study by Arbor Networks. Support for IPv6 in µTorrent version 1.8, a version of the world's most popular BitTorrent client released in August 2008, had a huge effect.

"The introduction of IPv6 P2P succeeded where most previous IPv6 inducement efforts had failed (i.e. liberal peering, high quality IPv6 porn, IPv6 ASCII animation of Star Wars, etc.)," writes Arbor Networks researcher Craig Labovitz. "In the space of ten months µTorrent helped drive IPv6 traffic from 0.002 per cent to 0.03 per cent of all internet traffic (a dramatic 15x jump)."

Another IPv6 traffic increase came in April 2009, when Hurricane Electric introduced a global Teredo relay service. Hurricane Electric lit up 14 Teredo relays in Seattle, Fremont, Los Angeles, Chicago, Dallas, Toronto, New York, Ashburn, Miami, London, Paris, Amsterdam, Frankfurt and Hong Kong. Teredo tunneling is a protocol for passing IPv6 data packets through network address translation devices.
Arbor's IPv6 traffic diagram shows an increase from 0.02 per cent to between 0.04 and 0.03 per cent of IPv6 traffic after introduction of Hurricane's service. IPv6 connectivity across the net has historically been useless. The introduction of Hurricane's service goes some way towards addressing an entrenched problem that resulted in inefficient routing and overall lack of coordination between Teredo and 6to4 relay providers that added latency, loss and jitter to IPv6 traffic, Arbor explains.
The IPv6 study compiled by Arbor uses traffic statistics from 110 ISPs. Only six ISPs out of Arbor's 110 have native IPv6 enabled. Because of this limitation, Arbor's data includes only IPv6 traffic through Teredo and 6to4 tunnels.
A similar 2008 IPv6 study by Arbor was criticised for underestimating IPv6 traffic. Amsterdam Internet Exchange (AMS-IX) switch statistics showed a Gigabit or more of IPv6 traffic were cited by critics of Arbor's figures. However a July 2009 news server outage support Arbor's theory that AMS-IX IPv6 traffic was largely made up of file sharing through the free AMS-IX based IPv6 news servers and therefore not representative of the internet as a whole.
IPv6, the next generation internet protocol, brings a vastly expanded address space along with security and mobility refinements. Uptake has been slow despite predictions that a greater number of internet-connected devices and expansion of the net into countries such as China would result in IPv4 numbers getting used up. The widespread use of network address translation (NAT) technology has prevented IPv4 address exhaustion from becoming a pressing problem and the interweb has continued much as before.
Cutting-edge technology firms, such as Cisco and Google, have been big supporters of the technology, but mainstream users have stayed clear of it because of the lack of a clear business need for the technology.

Bron: The Register

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Ipv6

2009-09-14T09:18:00.002+02:00

Prepare, Don’t Panic.

Dit artikel bevat de volgende onderdelen:

Life, the universe and IPv6
- Interconnections
- Content
- Security
- DOCSIS
- Service introduction
- Provisioning and DNS
- Home networking
Don’t Panic
Bridges at the edge
Summary

Lees het volledige artikel op Cable360

Psst! Wanna Buy A Black-Market IP Address?

2009-08-18T09:24:00.000+02:00

Some problems always seem so far away -- until you turn around and find them chomping on the seat of your pants.

For many years now, IT experts have known that the world's supply of IP addresses was inadequate. This trend, known as "IP exhaustion," is the main driver behind the move from IPv4 -- the prevalent version of the Internet Protocol standard -- to IPv6.

This transition will solve the problem of IP address scarcity -- if not forever, then certainly for generations to come. While IPv4 provides for a little over four billion unique IP addresses (in theory -- the actual number is smaller in practice), IPv6 will up the ante considerably.

How considerably? We're talking about a number with 38 zeroes in it.

The problem is that the IT industry has been painfully slow to get behind IPv6. That's understandable, since legacy networking equipment rarely supports the standard and often lacks the ability to add support via firmware upgrades. Even today, many Internet hosts and routers have serious problems with IPv6 compatibility.

So migrating to IPv6 is an expensive, time-consuming solution to a problem that always seemed just a little too far away to take seriously.

That distance, however, turned out to be an illusion: We're very close to hitting the wall with IPv4. Lots of Web sites now post "IP exhaustion countdown" widgets that purport to show how much time remains until the big day.

But it won't really be a "big day." Since IP addresses are allocated in a hierarchical manner, IPv4 exhaustion will happen in a series of smaller steps. Eventually, however, ordinary business Internet users are likely to feel a financial pinch as the IP address shortage trickles down.

Geoff Huston is chief scientist at APNIC, one of the regional Internet registries that distributes IP addresses to ISPs and other large organizational users. APINC and other regional registries get their IP addresses from the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA). According to Huston, IANA will run out of addresses some time between July 2009 and 2011.

APINC and other regional registries will, in turn, exhaust their supply of IPv4 addresses between October 2009 and July 2012.

What happens next? At first, perhaps nothing. Many ISPs and large organizations are sitting on large blocks of unused IPv4 addresses. Unless the rules change considerably (and they just might), these groups will be free to redistribute the unused addresses as they see fit.

This brings us to the next phase of the address exhaustion process: the point where ordinary business users that rely on IP addresses to host Web sites or to run servers may notice some changes.

David Siegel, a VP at Global Crossing, writes that "This could be a very interesting time, as ISP's that have space to allocate may have a competitive advantage over those that do not and may be able to charge a premium as a result!"

In other words, service providers will have every incentive to charge more -- perhaps much more -- to provide users with static IP addresses. According to Siegel, we could see this start to happen within 4-6 years.

Finally, Siegel writes, we will reach the final step in the IPv4 exhaustion process:

"The last and final phase, much like the selling of datacenter space, will involve money and perhaps some begging. The black market, perhaps Ebay, will become the only place that one can acquire addresses. They may not even be transferable across upstream providers, but that won't keep people from trying to trade them. Eventually the cost of IPv4 address space will be more than someone is willing to pay for and the v4 Internet will officially be sold out."

Seigel thinks this phase will take up to 10 years to play out. Of course, companies that rely upon static IP addresses will be paying through their noses quite a bit sooner than that.

Will the IT industry ride to the rescue and push to get enough IPv6 infrastructure into place before it comes to this? A so-called "dual stack" strategy exists to migrate the world from IPv4 to v6, and it could allow a smooth, trouble-free migration path.

Or at least it could have if we had started the process about a decade sooner. Here is what Huston writes about the dual stack strategy:

"Under this dual-stack regime every new host on the Internet is envisaged to need access to both IPv6 and IPv4 addresses in order to converse with any other host using IPv6 or IPv4. Of course this approach works as long as there is a continuing supply of IPv4 addresses, implying that the envisioned timing of the transition was meant to have been completed by the time that IPv4 address exhaustion happens."

The catch: Huston concludes that even if we had started working seriously on a migration process in 2008, we might still need twice as many IPv4 addresses to complete it without hitting any IP address shortages.

Now, it's a moot point. The industry waited too long to get moving, and it will pay the price. The only questions are how much and for how long.

Every IT problem tends to create a new market for solutions. This problem is no different: So-called "tunnel brokers," for example, provide a certain measure of interoperability between IPv4 and IPv6 networks.

These technologies, however, can introduce new problems of their own. Also, inevitably, such solutions represent a new source of cost and complexity for businesses that implement them.

This is a fascinating problem, and it illustrates how big, slow-moving, supposedly risk-averse organizations still get clobbered by problems they see coming miles -- or years -- away. But will there be anything ordinary businesses can do about it, except watch this mess unfold and hope it doesn't cost them too much?

I doubt it. IP exhaustion isn't the end of the world by any means. But it could make the Internet a more expensive place to do business for a long time to come.

Bron: bMighty

IPv4-adressen al op in 2010

2009-08-12T11:35:00.001+02:00

Volgens nieuwe berekening zal de IANA haar laatste /8 blok met IPv4 adressen al in december 2010 uitgeven. Eerder werd geschat dat dit in januari 2011 zal zijn. Hoewel het slechts een maand scheelt, lijkt de ‘depletion’ van IPv4 adressen steeds dichterbij te komen.

In Europa zijn onlangs weer grote IPv4 blokken uitgegeven. Zowel Belgacom als Britisch Telecom hebben beiden 1 miljoen IPv4-adressen toegewezen gekregen van de RIPE. De voorraad die nu nog aanwezig is bij de RIPE lijkt daarmee te krimpen. RIPE zal dus binnenkort bij de IANA moeten aankloppen om twee keer een /8 subnet aan te vragen.

Bron: ISPam

* Social Web * Email * Close Digg Slashdot Fark Stumble Reddit MIXX del.icio.us Newsvine Technorati Facebook Buzz up!

2009-08-03T10:36:00.002+02:00

Network World heeft een artikel geplaatst met een overzicht van IPv6 gerelateerde artikelen.

Google shares secrets of IPv6 success

2009-07-29T12:18:00.001+02:00

In a new video released today, Google has reaffirmed its commitment to IPv6 and shared some tips on how to make migration to the new protocol as painless as possible.

Speaking in a video interview with not for profit internet infrastructure organisation Ripe NCC, Google network engineer Lorenzo Colitti explained that IPv6 will enable the web giant to provide a better user experience for its customers.

"It's another way of reaching Google services," he added. "If we can serve our users better over IPv6 than we can over IPv4 then we will do it. For the moment we're catering to early adopters and trying to gain operational experience, and trying to help other people gain operational experience by doing Google over IPv6."

Google launched its IPv6 service in March, having gone from 'zero' to being able to provide users with a good connection in around a year and a half, he said.

"A lot of progress can be made because it's not a huge undertaking [although] it's something requiring a lot of pieces in a lot of different places in the infrastructure to come together," he added. "But it can be done with not too many resources in a reasonably short time."

Colitti explained that the best way for organisations to proceed with IPv6 projects is to try to "tap into the enthusiasm that no doubt exists" in their company, in order to gather volunteers who would be excited about such work "and they'll surprise you".

Nice idea Google, although perhaps it's a little unfair to think that other network operators attempting to implement IPv6 can leverage a troop of competent, passionate network engineers as the web behemoth no doubt has access to.

Pv6: Oops, it's on by default

2009-07-27T14:59:00.000+02:00

[...]

Leave IPv6 enabled or not

Whether to leave IPv6 “enabled or not” is about as clear as mud. There’s the yes camp and there’s the no camp with the whole gray area in between littered with other opinions. I thought I’d let the experts introduced in Marsan’s article present their views:

Tim LeMaster: Director of systems engineering for Juniper’s federal group mentions:

“If you’re not prepared for IPv6, then the prudent thing to do is not to allow it into your network,” LeMaster says. “But you shouldn’t be blocking all IPv6 traffic for the next five years. You should only block it until you have a policy and understand the threats.”

Lisa Donnan: Vice president of advanced technology solutions at Command Information has a different viewpoint:

“We don’t recommend that you block IPv6 traffic. We are recommending that you do an audit and find out how many IPv6 devices and applications are on your network. If you have IPv6 traffic on your network, then you’ve got to plan, train, and implement IPv6.”

Sheila Frankel: Computer scientist in the Computer Security Division of the National Institutes of Standards and Technology (NIST) expresses a middle-ground viewpoint:

“Companies need to acquire a minimal level of expertise in IPv6, which will help protect them against threats. The other thing they should do is to take their outward-facing servers, those that are external to the corporation’s firewalls, and enable IPv6 on them. That way, customers from Asia with IPv6 addresses will be able to reach these servers and their own people will acquire expertise in IPv6. This will be a first step in the process.”

[...]

Lees het hele artikel op: TechRepublic

Tien hosting trends in 2009

2009-07-24T11:58:00.000+02:00

Een interessant artikel op Royal Pingdom: ‘10 hot hosting trends in 2009′. Zij spelen hiermee vooruit op Hostingcon, een grote conferentie die volgende maand plaatsheeft in Washington DC. Als eerste staat – voor Amerikanen – een heel interessante: De implementatie van IPv6.

De implementatie van IPv6 schijnt in de Verenigde Staten nog niet vlot te lopen. Implementatie in soft- en firmware loopt achter, providers en enkele enterprise bedrijven houden zeer grote IP-blokken in bezit (Tot een /8 toe!) en ikzelf ken nog maar weinig providers die native IPv6 verbindingen kunnen leveren bij bijvoorbeeld een dedicated server.

[...]

Bron: ISPam

Gogo6 levert IPv6-tunnel CPE's en bijbehorende servers

2009-07-16T10:35:00.002+02:00

Het bedrijf Gogo6 heeft de producten en diensten overgenomen van Hexago. Ze leveren nu onder andere:
- gogoServer: een tunnel server voor IPv6-over-IPv4 en IPv4-over-IPv6
- gogoClient: een software client voor de gogoServer
- gogoCPE: een hardwarematige client voor de gogoServer

Vooral deze laatste is erg interessant. Een eindgebruiker hoeft alleen maar het kastje in zijn netwerk te hangen, en automatisch wordt het netwerk van IPv6 voorzien.

Meer informatie: www.gogo6.com

Introweb eerste met IPv6-Only ADSL

2009-06-25T12:50:00.000+02:00

Voor het symbolische bedrag van (IPv)6 euro per maand kunnen bedrijven een 8Mbps ADSL-verbinding bij Introweb afnemen. Dat is een koopje, maar de internetverbinding ondersteunt dan ook alleen IPv6 en geen IPv4. Introweb is daarmee de eerste ISP in Nederland en wellicht ook wereldwijd die een IPv6-only internetverbinding aanbiedt.

Het aanbod is een pilot waar maximaal 100 klanten aan deel kunnen nemen. In principe is de pilot enkel bedoeld voor bedrijven, aldus Introweb marketing manager Pieter de Haer tegenover ISPam.nl. Omdat het abonnement onder de kostprijs wordt aangeboden, wordt het na één jaar automatisch stopgezet of kan worden omgezet in een gewoon abonnement.

Introweb heeft er bewust voor gekozen om IPv6 over een aparte en niet over bestaande ADSL-verbindingen aan te bieden. Het voordeel van een aparte ADSL-verbinding is dat er niet geëxperimenteerd hoeft te worden met de operationele internetverbinding van de klant. Indien er geen linesharing of tweede telefoonlijn beschikbaar is bij de klant, dan kan deze voor 40 euro eenmalig en 7,90 euro per maand een extra telefoonlijn laten aanleggen. Ook kunnen klanten die nog niet beschikken over een IPv6 Ready ADSL-modem voor 125 euro een refurbished Cisco 836 (ISDN) of 837 (PTSN) router bij Introweb aanschaffen.

Met de pilot wil Introweb klanten ervaring laten op doen met IPv6. Daarnaast wil het bedrijf zelf ook verder ervaring op doen met IPv6. Het netwerk is al langer IPv6 Enabled evenals de eigen website. Introweb denkt door de ervaring die wordt opgedaan met de pilot absoluut een voorsprong op de concurrentie te hebben die nog geen ervaring met IPv6 hebben opgedaan.

De Haer heeft nog geen idee of er veel aanmeldingen komen voor de pilot. De pilot is op het moment van schrijven net gelanceerd en het is dus nog afwachten op de eerste aanmelding. Meer informatie over de pilot staat hier en aanmelden kan via dit formulier (pdf).

Bron: ISPam

German and Swedish Governments Prioritise IPv6 Deployment

2009-06-23T16:10:00.000+02:00

What: Two new videos outlining deployment of IPv6 by the German and Swedish governments have been added to IPv6 Act Now, the website run by the RIPE NCC to raise awareness of the need to adopt the new Internet protocol, IPv6.

German Government
Constanze Bürger from the Department of Federal IT Infrastructure and IT Security Management, discusses the German government’s decision to deploy IPv6. She explains, “We need an Internet ready for the next generation, with better technology creating greater possibilities. This is the reason why we planned, in a political way, to deploy IPv6. It is necessary to talk about our plans as a government and demonstrate leadership to providers and vendors."

Swedish Government
In the second video Patrick Fälström, advisor to the Swedish government, explains the various models by which governments can encourage IPv6 adoption in their region. These include changes to legislation, subsidies and statements, as well as acting as a procurer of IPv6-compatible technology.

Patrick emphasises that “As a provider of services, it is very important for the government that anyone can access their services, just like any private company is interested in having as many customers as possible. For example, the Swedish government has explicitly said that its goal is that anyone should be able to access any service from anywhere.”

Statistics Update
Updated information on the number of IPv6 allocations made by the RIPE NCC is also available on the statistics page of IPv6 Act Now. Germany remains the largest adopter of IPv6, closely followed by the UK and the Netherlands. Axel Pawlik, managing director of the RIPE NCC comments: “These figures show continued growth of IPv6 allocations in our region, but we urge all countries to speed deployment of the new protocol in order to safeguard the future of Internet development. It is important that governments recognise their role in this process, by making services available over IPv6 and providing the necessary support and guidance to organisations looking to adopt IPv6.”

Bron: RIPE NCC

Comcast Preps for IPv6

2009-06-17T15:19:00.000+02:00

PHILADELPHIA -- Comcast Corporation (Nasdaq: CMCSA, CMCSK), the nation’s leading provider of entertainment, information and communications products and services, today demonstrated end-to-end network readiness for the transition to next-generation Internet addressing protocols (IPv6) and will ensure continued support for its customers through this transition.

Lees verder op: Light reading

Breedband Delft: IPv6 is niet moeilijk

2009-06-16T11:43:00.000+02:00

Bedrijven en instellingen in de Delftse regio kunnen met de snelheid van gigabit ethernet met IPv6 het internet op. Door Stichting Breedband Delft wordt sinds kort namelijk naast IPv4 ook native IPv6-connectiviteit aangeboden aan haar deelnemers.

Er was bij Breedband Delft een duidelijke vraag naar native IPv6-connectiviteit: “Een van onze grootste deelnemers met enkele honderden computers maakte al gebruik van IPv6 op het eigen netwerk en had via een SixxS tunnel ook via IPv6 toegang tot internet.”, aldus Paul Hoogsteder, consultant bij Meanie en technisch adviseur van Breedband Delft “Nu we het aanbieden, zijn er direct vier andere grote deelnemers begonnen met het testen met IPv6.“.

Het aanbieden van IPv6 werd mogelijk na een volledige herinrichting van het netwerk van Breedband Delft in mei 2009. Toen is overstapt van een 155Mbit verbinding van Ziggo naar een netwerk dat volledig in eigen beheer is. Breedband Delft heeft eigen glasvezels liggen naar het Global Switch datacentrum in Amsterdam en het Tele2 datacentrum (Spaanse kubus) in Rotterdam. Daar heeft het Juniper M7i routers staan die ondermeer op de NL-ix zijn aangesloten. De totale hoeveelheid IPv6-verkeer over het netwerk van Breedband Delft bedraagt hooguit een procent van de totale hoeveelheid dataverkeer.

Om de overstap naar IPv6 te bevorderen bieden Breedband Delft en netwerkspecialist Meanie alle aangesloten deelnemers van Breedband Delft gratis een halve dag consultancy aan om de deelnemers te helpen bij de overstap naar IPv6: “Veel mensen denken dat de overstap op IPv6 moeilijk of kostbaar is. Veel hard- en software is echter al geschikt voor IPv6. Op basis van een inventarisatie van de aanwezige infrastructuur van een deelnemer laten we zien hoe snel en veilig toegang tot internet via IPv6 zonder noemenswaardige inspanning mogelijk is.”.

Bron: ISPam

Upgraded BlueCat IP address management appliance could ease IPv6 adoption

2009-06-15T09:49:00.001+02:00

BlueCat Networks will announce on Thursday a new version of its IP address management appliance with enhancements designed to reduce the time it takes to manage IP address space. That's an issue growing in importance as network operators adopt IPv6, an upgrade to the Internet's main communications protocol.

New features in Proteus 3.0 include an enhanced user interface, built-in monitoring of Domain Name System (DNS) and Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) services, and a data validation capability for automatically checking DNS and DHCP configurations.

"One of our goals as an organization is for our customers to spend as little time as possible on our products through integration with other products or through streamlining the interface and tools," says Branko Miskov, director of product management with BlueCat. "We've redesigned the flow and architecture and layout of the interface to make it much easier for users to access data. If we shave 10 or 15 seconds off an action item, we're talking about hours each year in time savings for administrators."

BlueCat also added to Proteus 3.0 support for NSEC3, an algorithm that is being used in the deployment of DNS security mechanisms by leading-edge domains such as .org.

For enterprise customers, the key feature in the latest version of Proteus is that network administrators can use it to manage multiple versions of BlueCat's Adonis software rather than having to upgrade them all to the latest version. Adonis appliances handle DNS and DHCP services and can be managed through the Proteus interface.

The price of Proteus appliances remains the same despite the additional features. A typical network installation including one Proteus appliance and two Adonis appliances costs around $50,000.

BlueCat's Proteus and Adonis appliances have supported IPv6 since 2007. IPv6 uses 128-bit addresses, while the current protocol IPv4 uses 32-bit addresses. With IPv6, the issue of maintaining an up-to-date and accurate repository of IP addresses within an organization through an appliance like Proteus will become more critical, experts say.

Bron: Network World

IPv6 the topic for special edition of the LINX Internet magazine, HotLINX

2009-06-15T09:47:00.000+02:00

The London Internet Exchange (LINX) has announced the publication of a special IPv6 edition of the Internet magazine, HotLINX, available for download now from the LINX website.

Current estimates are that there is as little as 11% remaining of the total number of IPv4 addresses, which could be exhausted in as little as two years. In contrast, IPv6 is an addressing scheme that uses 128 bits that allows for a total of 340 billion billion billion billion unique addresses. However, while the advantages in making the transition from the current IPv4 infrastructure seem clear, it does require careful management to ensure that all elements of the move to IPv6 are transparent to end users. Key industry professional have beeen interviewed to offer their views on a range of IPv6 addressing issues and on what should be done to encourage a more rapid deployment of IPv6 in the future.

In addition, a further four pages of this expanded 16-page issue have been dedicated to the recent LINX IPv6 workshop staged at the Goodenough College in London. The event was designed to promote the features and benefits of using IPv6 especially in light of the decline of available IPv4 address space. Such was the interest in the event that well over 100 industry professionals attended the London workshop looking to learn more about the techniques and tools needed to offer IPv6 on their networks.

Elsewhere in this issue there is a feature on how peering with LINX has never been easier with new research showing that 85% of all LINX members are offering either an open or selective peering policy. This couples nicely with an expanded new LINX member section complete with detailed peering information. Meanwhile, data retention law is the main topic for public affairs discussion in a new governance section while there is a round up of Internet industry events, both in the UK and abroad. There is also an article on how people can learn about what's happening at LINX by following instant updates on social media websites.

You can download a PDF copy of HotLINX18 today at https://www.linx.net/

files/hotlinx/hotlinx-18.pdf. Printed copies can be ordered by emailing: hotlinx@linx.net

IPv6-Adoptie bij opvolger 3G telefonie

2009-06-10T15:55:00.000+02:00

Met de komt van de opvolger van het huidige 3G netwerk zal het IPv6 gebruik ook toenemen. Verizon is in de Verenigde Staten al druk aan het testen met LTE. En omdat telefonie nu niet meer op de traditionele manier gaat maar LTE een groot datanetwerk is, zullen voip-technieken gebruikt worden om te bellen. En met miljoenen mobieltjes zal hiermee de overstap naar IPv6 gemaakt worden.

Vanuit elke LTE-telefoon wordt 24/7 een dataverbindingin stand gehouden. Verizon heeft in de specificatie opgenomen dat IPv4 support mag, maar support voor IPv6 aanwezig moet zijn. Wanneer er toch gebruik wordt gemaakt van IPv4 dan moet er ook een IPv6 verbinding aanwezig zijn. De toekenning van IPv4 adressen mag gebruikt worden voor applicaties, maar zodra de applicatie gesloten wordt, moet het IPv4-adres weer terug gegeven worden aan de DHCP-pool.

IPv6 is niet nieuw in mobiele telefoons en wordt veelal al ondersteund in de handsets. Windows Mobile en Symbian (Nokia) hebben reeds ondersteuning voor IPv6 en Android (Google) is met de implementatie bezig. Blackberry ende Iphone hebben nog geen support voor IPv6. De firmware/SDK van de iPhone is wel ‘IPv6 clean’, waardoor custom implementatie mogelijk is.

Bron: ISPam

ARIN fighting IPv6 FUD with Comics

2009-05-27T09:36:00.001+02:00

We've been warned that the Internet is running out of IPv4 address space and the end is near. Yet for some reason, IPv6, isn't something that is being broadly adopted -- in North America at least. We need a hero, or maybe a few superheroes to save the day right?

Complete info at InternetNews.

IPv6 PR machine cranks up

2009-05-25T14:46:00.000+02:00

The Internet industry has been warning for years that IPv4 addresses are running out and, generally, bemoaning the slow uptake of IPv6. Now action is being taken to accelerate IPv6 adoption with two separate IPv6 promotional initiatives launched in the past week.

IPv6 will have several orders of magnitude more addresses available than IPv4, sufficient to give every conceivable device it own unique address. But despite these and other benefits, implementation has been slow.

Earlier this year, a survey of organisations across Asia Pacific, commissioned by APNIC and conducted by KPMG, revealed that nearly two thirds of those surveyed were not adequately prepared for the transition to IPv6. And last November a report from Nemertes Research warned of several serious impending problems with the Internet but held out little hope of IPv6 solving these problems any time soon. It dismissed IPv6 as "too little too late".

This week, in an attempt to crank up the momentum behind IPv6, RIPE NCC, the not-for-profit organisation that supports the infrastructure of the Internet, launched the 'IPv6 Act Now' website www.ipv6actnow.org to "explain the new Internet protocol in terms that everyone can understand," and to "urge adoption of IPv6 by all organisations integral to the Internet's infrastructure."

RIPE NCC says the site is "designed to appeal to everyone with an interest in IPv6, from network engineers to company directors, from law enforcement agencies to government representatives and civil society." It shows support for the RIPE IPv6 position statement from an exhaustive list of high profile technology and telecoms brands and governments alongside commercial and not-for-profit organisations.

According to RIPE NCC, site content will be updated regularly and will include "Expert education, advice and opinion; the latest relevant news stories; written and video content from Internet community leaders; current IPv4 exhaustion/IPv6 uptake statistics, European Commission updates; information on IPv6 distribution policies; and useful links to other sources of IPv6 information.

Separately the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) has just launched an IPv6 website www.itu.int/net/ITU-T/ipv6/ to provide information about global activities related to IPv6 so as to raise awareness of IPv6 deployment, as well as provide information on training events being undertaken by organisations in the Internet community.

However Nemertes Research is not the only organisation peddling doom and gloom for the Internet and claiming that a more radical solution than IPv6 must be found. Last month a new body, the Pouzin Society, http://pouzinsociety.org was formed "to provide a forum for developing viable solutions to the current Internet architecture crisis." It claims that the Internet suffers from fundamental scaling problems that will only be exacerbated by IPv6.

Bron: ITWire

Thoughts on IPv6 Security, Take Two

2009-05-25T14:38:00.001+02:00

A few months ago, I made a post about IPv6 security. I've caught some flak for saying that IPv6 isn't a security issue. I still stand by this position.

This is not to say that you should ignore security considerations when deploying IPv6. All I claim is that deploying IPv6 in and of itself does not make an organization any more or less secure. This point was made by Dr. Joe St. Sauver, of the University of Oregon, in an excellent talk on IPv6 security at the Winter 2009 Internet2 Joint Techs meeting (video is also available). Joe's talk is the most level-headed analysis of IPv6 security I've seen. I highly recommend watching it.

[...]

Deploying IPv6 won't make you any more or less secure. But like any "new" technology, it takes time to deploy it right. So start now!

Lees het volledige artikel op CircleID

Interop Las Vegas 2009 IPv6 Survey

2009-05-25T14:35:00.001+02:00

We've heard on this site and many other trade journals that the IPv4 address space is running out (and a unique proposal about simulating outages) and that dire consequences occur if we do not act.

Last week in Las Vegas, the Interop show took place. An unofficial count of 14,000 technology buyers and enthusiasts attended. While much lower than its record (over 100,000 strong), the show is still the biggest technology show which features a major presence by virtually every networking vendor. While exhibiting at Interop, we decided to walk the Interop Expo and ask the IPv6 support question to see if the mainstream corporate and enterprise space agrees with the need to think beyond IPv4.

Thankfully, the companies that recognize this as an issue and are open to the challenge were more than happy to chat with us about it. However, it does seem like many companies are trying to control the message when it comes to IPv6 adoption. We recognized that most people first approached tried to steer us towards marketing reps before committing to a response. We decided to push anyway and got many great responses from Product Managers, Sales Engineers and Senior IT folks, as well.

"MRV has an 80% adoption in our gear," said Isaac Kim, Director, Optical Transit at MRV. "Most of the influence was driven by our military clients with some push out of Europe, as well. We're seeing this as a growing trend and are prepared."

That feedback was typical of the IPv6 supports who said it was Asia and Europe end-user demand and US Government requirements. One could say that the US Government mandate for IPv6 support was widely successful.

17 companies surveyed right at the start of Interop Las Vegas:

Full Adoption - 10 companies
Roadmap - 4 companies
No public comment given - 3 companies

Some general comments and observations:

Every company who gave a response either had full adoption or had a planned strategy in place.
The bigger companies plead are pretty quiet about their support or non-support. Many of the large transit providers including Verizon and Qwest simply said "no comment".
Overall influence is government/military based. Lots of comments about AsiaPac leading the charge.
Seems to be viewed as more of a trend with lots of chatter and buzz. The consensus is that companies are taking it seriously.
Polycom - Driven by APAC. Japan wanted it the most. Support in all HD video.
Xirrus - Original mandate from government. Full IPv6 in Japan.
Force10 Networks - Asia cares. Full adoption in all products. Government is driving implementation.
Breaking point - US government is doing a lot on the test side of things.
Shoretel - Not seeing serious customer demand. On roadmap at the edge, but more based on buzz.

Bron: CircleID

Interoute adopts IPv6 to guarantee IP addresses for the next century

2009-05-14T09:37:00.000+02:00

London, 12 May 2009 - Interoute, owner operator of Europe’s largest next-generation network, has increased the capacity of its network to include native support for the incoming IPv6 Internet protocol. IPv6 will create billions of new IP addresses to supplement the current public protocol, IPv4, supporting growing demand.

[...]

Matthew Finnie, Interoute’s joint CTO/CIO commented, “By incorporating IPv6 capability into our network we are a step ahead of forecasts made by industry analysts who estimate that the range of possible new addresses for IPv4 may reach a limit as early as 2011. The investment in a native IPv6 capability is testament to Interoute's commitment to ensuring its customers have access to the most advanced services from Europe’s most advanced network.”

Interoute’s Native IPv6 service means that any customer wanting to adopt this next generation protocol will be able to. In addition, Interoute will not make any additional charge for enabling IPv6 over and above the standard tariff.

Nederlandse IPv6 Awards 2009

2009-05-13T13:59:00.000+02:00

De Nederlandse Taskforce IPv6 organiseert opnieuw de IPv6 Awards. Het evenement werd vorig jaar afgelast, omdat er te weinig animo was. 'We schenken meer aandacht aan de awards door advertenties in tijdschriften en we plaatsen banners bij de deelnemende bedrijven. Daarom denken we dat het dit jaar wel gaat lukken', zegt junior-projectleider Dorien van Gastel. De awards worden uitgereikt aan bedrijven of instellingen voor voor de beste operationele implementaties met het internetprotocol versie 6.

6Deploy IPv6 training

2009-05-11T10:55:00.001+02:00

6Deploy heeft online IPv6 trainingen beschikbaar gesteld.

FutureNet 2009: IPv6 coming, ready or not

2009-05-08T14:26:00.000+02:00

Although many businesses say they see no economic advantage to deploying IPv6 over their networks, several panelists at this year's FutureNet said that they soon may not have a choice.

Bron: Network World

After Ten Years, Is IPv6 Finally Needed?

2009-05-08T14:24:00.001+02:00

Vint Cerf, Google's chief Internet evangelist and the man credited with inventing Internet protocol (IP), has said that CIOs need to be ready for IP version 6, and that if they're not, they need to figure out what to do to fix that. Apparently, IP version 4, the one most of the Internet's running on now, is facing a bit of an address crunch that threatens the existence of the Net as we know it.

Volledige artikel: eWeek Europe

The Internet’s Growing Pains

2009-05-07T14:30:00.001+02:00

[...]

For that reason, Vint Cerf, who helped develop the standards for Internet Protocol and is now chief Internet evangelist for Google, said, “I am a big proponent of simply getting on with IPv6 implementation everywhere” before IPv4 addresses run out.If that doesn’t happen, among the possible problems that can emerge, according to John Curran, acting chief executive of the American Registry for Internet Numbers, are:

“Individual users may not be able to view websites and communicate with certain Internet destinations.”
“Corporations may not be able to communicate with certain critical government resources, clients, and potential customers.”
“Governments may lose the ability to see and communicate with the ‘whole Internet.’ Citizens may not be able to access government information online or communicate over the Internet with government agencies.”

[...]

Lees het hele artikel op: The Wall Street Journal

When Really Big Numbers Aren't Nearly Enough

2009-05-07T14:28:00.001+02:00

The nine-digit Social Security Number is holding strong after 73 years. The 10-digit phone number is six decades old and counting. But the Internet will soon outlive its equivalent numbering system for identifying Web surfers and the sites they visit, which could have disruptive and costly consequences for life online.

As originally designed, Internet Protocol addresses contained 32 bits, represented in four sets of numbers from 0 to 255. There are 4.3 billion different possible combinations, which seemed like plenty to Vint Cerf, who helped develop the IP standards in the late 1970s.

"It was an experiment with an uncertain outcome," Mr. Cerf, now chief Internet evangelist for Google, says of the Internet. Some other online pioneers argued for 128 bits, but they lost out. "I couldn't imagine arguing that we needed 340 trillion trillion trillion addresses to carry out an experiment," Mr. Cerf says.

Lees het hele artikel in: The Wall Street Journal

IPv6 security guru fields questions

2009-05-07T14:20:00.002+02:00

Dit artikel van Scott Hogg behandelt de volgende onderwerpen:

You say that a lot of organizations may already have IPv6 running over their networks and not realize it. Can you give me an example of how this happens?
Can you explain in greater detail what you mean by IPv6 traffic being "tunneled" through IPv4 systems?
What are some of the unique challenges in securing a dual-stack network that supports both IPv4 and IPv6?
How do the security challenges of IPv6 networks differ from those of IPv4 networks?
Finally, if a company came to you and asked you to help them make a checklist of things they would need to do before changing over to IPv6, what would you tell them?

Bron: Network World

IPv6 Provider Independent address available as of today in the RIPE NCC service region

2009-05-06T16:23:00.002+02:00

We are pleased to announce that the RIPE NCC now accept requests for IPv6 Provider Independent (PI) assignments. This follows the accepted policy proposal 2006-01 "Provider Independent (PI) IPv6 Assignments for End User Organisations".

The request form and supporting notes are available from the RIPE Document Store at:
http://www.ripe.net/ripe/docs/ipv6.html

Requests can also be made via the LIR Portal, which is available at:
https://lirportal.ripe.net/

IPv6 PI assignments will come from reserved block 2001:678::/29. You may want to update your filters.

Regards,
Scott Donald
Registration Services
RIPE NCC

Agency tightens IPv4 address procedure

2009-05-04T17:17:00.001+02:00

Expecting the supply to dry up soon, ARIN will seek to verify that applications are legitimate.

The organization that assigns Internet addresses in the U.S. plans to raise the bar for getting them as the supply of IPv4 (Internet Protocol, version 4) addresses nears exhaustion, raising the specter of aggressive speculation on a soon-to-be-rare resource.

The American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN) has sent a letter to users of IPv4 addresses warning them that it expects IPv4 addresses to run out within the next two years. ARIN and others have warned before that this version of the addressing system, instituted in the early days of the Internet, would soon run out of unused numbers.

When that happens, anyone who wants a new IP address will have to get it under IPv6, the emerging protocol that has a vastly larger number of possible numbers. IP addresses are assigned in large blocks to companies, carriers and other entities. Different agencies assign the numbers in different parts of the world.

Beginning as early as May 18, ARIN will require applications for IPv4 addresses to include an "attestation of accuracy from an organizational officer," ARIN Chairman John Curran wrote in a letter dated April 15.

The Internet Storm Center posted a copy of it in a blog entry on Thursday.

ARIN said it would take this step "to ensure the legitimacy of all IPv4 address space requests" so those organizations with a legitimate need for address space can still get it. It wasn't clear from the letter whether the attestation would have to come from an officer of ARIN or of the entity applying for the addresses.

Curran was not immediately available to comment.

The two-year warning is in line with most other projections regarding IPv4 addresses running out, according to Burton Group analyst David Passmore. He believes ARIN wants to head off a "land grab."

"Anytime demand exceeds supply, there's going to be a market," Passmore said. "You or I could submit bogus requests, build a stockpile and resell to buyers."

Also in the letter, ARIN advised address holders to begin planning for IPv6 adoption. In particular, it said they should make their publicly accessible resources, such as Web and e-mail servers, accessible via IPv6.

IPv4 depletion is most dire in parts of the world with fast-growing populations of Internet users, such as China and India, but that doesn't mean U.S. enterprises will dodge the bullet completely, Passmore said.

Once users start switching over to IPv6, any company that wants to reach those users will need to support the new protocol. However, IPv4 addresses within an organization will still be usable. The two protocols can coexist in a network.

"This does not mean that typical large enterprises are going to have to go out and re-number their networks," Passmore said. There's no wholesale change on the horizon even if IPv4 addresses run out when ARIN believes they will. "Even two years from now, the IPv6 traffic will only be a tiny fraction of IPv4," Passmore said.

IPv6 adoption has been slow despite warnings about address depletion going back a decade or more. A study by Arbor Networks and the University of Michigan, released last August, showed that IPv6 traffic represented less than one one-hundredth of one percent of all Internet traffic.

Bron: PC World

IPv6… Canada About to Score?

2009-05-04T17:15:00.001+02:00

USA-Canada World Championship hockey games never fail to elicit great excitement. In the IPv6 adoption world league however, the US seems to have a convincing lead over their northern neighbour but the game is not over yet, here come the Canucks.

Internet evolution, and IPv6 in particular, were the major themes at the ISACC (ICT Standards Advisory Council of Canada) Plenary meeting in Ottawa mid April. Presentation of the Government of Canada IPv6 transition Strategy, including timelines, was undoubtedly the highlight of the day. Leveraging the Australian Government IPv6 transition model, the Canadian Federal Government envisages three phases in the transition; preparation (jan 2009- dec 2010), transition (jan 2011-dec 2013) and implementation (January 2014-dec 2015).

Surprising? Not really. In its quiet ways , Canada has pioneered IPv6 since its early days. Canarie, Canada's national Research and Education Network, co-funded the Chicago 6TAP while the Canadian freenet6 tunneling service has provided more than 150,000 IPv6 over IPv4 tunnels and was, for a while, the world's premier IPv6 transit point. The first intercontinental native IPv6 connectivity was tried out between the CRC in Ottawa and Berkom in Berlin, Germany, back in 1998. Teleglobe, now part of Tata Communications, became founding member of the IPv6 Forum in 1999 and has been offering commercial IPv6 connectivity since 2004.

The Government's IPv6 mettle will likely be tested in the upcoming GENS Government Enterprise Network Services calls for tender. The goal is ambitious with the consolidation and convergence of the Government's current 124 separate networks. Some laggards on the network and equipment supply side will likely lobby to say that IPv6 is not that urgent and that they will support it in the future anyways while some consultants will see, in many years of transition, many years of contracts.

Some of us, in the discussion period at the Ottawa ISSAC plenary, emphasized the need for some early measurable deliverables such as IPv6 accessibility of selected public Government websites. Interesting to note that ARIN's most recent letter [PDF], to ISP CEO's, also considers publicly accessible resources such as external web servers and e-mail servers a logical place to start.

The IPv6 puck rebounds, is passed from behind the internet, he shoots, he ....

Bron: Circle ID

NetApp Data ONTAP Achieves U.S. Government Certification for IPv6

2009-05-01T14:06:00.000+02:00

SUNNYVALE, Calif. - (Business Wire) NetApp (NASDAQ:NTAP) today announced that its Data ONTAP® software has been certified by the U.S. Department of Defense for Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) interoperability. As a result, NetApp is now listed on the U.S. federal government's Special Interoperability Certification for IPv6 Capability list.

The current version of IP in widespread use, IPv4, was first defined and deployed over 25 years ago, and its limit of about 4 billion addresses will eventually be exhausted. IPv6, a replacement for IPv4, is the next generation of the Internet Protocol, with virtually inexhaustible address space that allows improved security, extended routing capabilities, and IP mobility. All products purchased in support of Department of Defense networks must be IPv6 capable.

The certification testing was completed by the Joint Interoperability Test Command at Ft. Huachuca, Arizona, on March 13, 2009. The system used during the testing was a NetApp® FAS3020 storage system running NetApp Data ONTAP version 7.3.1. Because of the unified storage approach used by NetApp, all NetApp storage systems running on Data ONTAP version 7.3.1 software are also certified as IPv6 capable.

The IPv6 interoperability certification enables federal government customers to deploy NetApp solutions with confidence in mixed IPv4 and IPv6 environments.

"This certification demonstrates our commitment to providing solutions with the most advanced technologies that meet the high standards of the U.S. government," said Mark Weber, president and general manager, U.S. Public Sector, NetApp. "As government agencies look to roll out IPv6 environments, we are prepared to help. Our unified storage solutions are precertified and ready to enable our customers to transform their data centers and improve their storage efficiency in IPv6 environments.”

Data ONTAP is a highly optimized, scalable, and flexible operating system that uniquely and concurrently supports any mix of storage area network (SAN), network-attached storage (NAS), and Internet Protocol SAN (IP SAN) environments. This unified storage software platform integrates seamlessly in UNIX®, Linux®, Windows®, and Web environments. The Data ONTAP operating system provides the foundation to build a storage infrastructure and an enterprise-wide data fabric for mission-critical business applications while lowering the total cost of ownership and complexity typically associated with the management of large-scale enterprise data centers.

Bron: The Earth Times

Packet Design's Route Explorer Adds IPv6 Support

2009-05-01T14:05:00.001+02:00

Route Analytics System Will Help Manage Large IP Networks as Organizations Begin Evolution From IPv4 to IPv6

SANTA CLARA, Calif., Apr 27, 2009 (BUSINESS WIRE) -- Packet Design has added support for IPv6 - the next-generation version of the Internet Protocol - to Route Explorer, its network management system that gives enterprises and service providers visibility into routing operations on their IP networks. The Internet Engineering Task Force developed IPv6 to replace the existing version, IPv4, which faces address-space limitations as Internet usage continues to grow.

With the new IPv6 capability, Route Explorer, which works by passively "listening" to routing protocol exchanges and computing a real-time, network-wide layer-3 topology, will now be able to monitor and analyze IPv6 networks, as well as those running IPv4. This information will enable network engineers to quickly identify and resolve problems, perform effective network maintenance, and do accurate change planning on increasingly complex networks that incorporate both versions of the protocol.

Route Explorer's IPv6 support is initially available for BGP (Border Gateway Protocol) and IS-IS (Intermediate System to Intermediate System), two routing protocols used widely by service providers. Support for IPv6 on the OSPF (Open Shortest Path First) routing protocol will be added later this year, followed by Cisco's enterprise-oriented EIGRP (Enhanced Interior Gateway Routing Protocol) in 2010.

"With the Internet expanding to encompass everything from phones to appliances, the use of IPv6 and its greatly expanded address space will become a necessity," said Jeff Raice, Packet Design's executive vice president of marketing and business development. "While few organizations today have moved exclusively to IPv6, many are beginning to deploy it in parallel with IPv4 as they prepare their networks to support next-generation standards and heavier traffic volumes. Companies in the Far East and a growing number of service providers worldwide are taking the lead in this area, and migration to IPv6 is mandated for the U.S. federal government. Since many of these organizations use Route Explorer to troubleshoot and plan their networks, it was critical for us to begin supporting IPv6 before it moves fully into the mainstream.

"Based on the market demand we've seen, IS-IS and BGP are most important for early adopters of IPv6, who are chiefly service providers. We will later add support for OSPF and EIGRP, as well as providing specialized variations such as 6PE, VPNv6 and 6VPE for providers of VPN [virtual private network] services."

Bron: MarketWatch

Scott Hogg Back to Cisco Subnet Core Networking and Security by Scott Hogg Previous Article IPv6 Summit Reaches Pinnacle

2009-05-01T14:03:00.000+02:00

This week the 2nd annual 2009 Rocky Mountain IPv6 Summit was held in Denver Colorado. This event is put on by the Rocky Mountain IPv6 Task Force and the University of Denver. The IPv6 Summit is a 2-day IPv6 educational event that is FREE to attend. While well over 400 people registered for the event, the event attracted 300 people over the two days.

The Rocky Mountain IPv6 Task Force is a regional sub-chapter of the North American IPv6 Task Force. These Task Forces are dedicated to the advancement and propagation of the Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6). The RMv6TF promotes IPv6 and works to educate the community on IPv6 and its benefits. The RMv6TF performs research and development and showcases IPv6 technology and services and shares this knowledge with the public. The RMv6TF works to put on local IPv6-focused events and further the use of IPv6 within the Rocky Mountain region. The RMv6TF is an organization that industry and government can look to for guidance on IPv6 transition information and advice about best practices and solutions involving IPv6. Our goals are to:

Provide education on IPv6 and its benefits
Promotion of IPv6 technology
Research and development and showcase IPv6 technology and services
Put on local IPv6-focused events
Work to further the use of IPv6 with a regional focus

To help us fulfill our mission we wanted to put on an event that would help educate the region’s IT organizations about IPv6. We wanted to share what we know about IPv6 in an effort to help you see the benefits using the IPv6 protocol may have for your organizations. The Rocky Mountain IPv6 Summit allows us to achieve many of these goals all at the same time.

ARIN, Juniper and Hurricane Electric were gold sponsors. Other sponsors included NTT America, Jeff Doyle and Associates, Global Technology Resources Inc. (GTRI), OPNET, Fluke Networks, Brocade, F5 and Level(3). These sponsors made it possible to have the event held without charging any of the attendees. The University of Denver provides us with a large auditorium so that we can host such a large event in comfort.

Based on the feedback from the audience at the IPv6 Summit the conference provided important background information on IPv6 and provided insight into the details of the IPv6 protocol. The first day of the conference was focused on tutorial information on IPv6 to help bring the audience up to speed on IPv6, the drivers and constraints for adoption, how it operates, transition mechanisms, IPv6 routing configuration, how to develop dual-protocol applications, and how to secure the deployment of IPv6.

Several presenters who were at the Google IPv6 Implementors Conference were also presenters at the IPv6 Summit. Cody Christman from NTT America gave a great talk about their IPv6 services, their experiences deploying IPv6 on their backbone and the Hikari TV system that NTT Playa has developed in Japan. Martin Levy from Hurricane Electric also shared their experiences with deploying IPv6 services for their customers and connecting to multiple other IPv6 peers and how deploying 6to4, and Teredo relays saves bandwidth. Stephan Lagerholm presented on the implications of using IPv6 on a LAN and also shared information about his IPv4 address depletion calculator site.

The keynote presenter Stephen Oronte gave a moving speech about the inevitability of IPv6. His presentation gave substantial business justification for this claim while providing a grounded and objective viewpoint on the slow IPv6 adoption rate. Jeff Doyle presented on all the issues one must be aware of when planning an IPv6 deployment. Ashish Zalani presented on how OPNET’s products can be used to perform an assessment of IPv6 capabilities. Stan Barber presented on how to implement IPv6 in a home network and the challenges encountered along the way. Yurie Rich presented on four examples of real-world deployments of IPv6 and how IPv6 uniquely makes these implementations possible. Ralph Wallace gave a talk on how to approach IPv6 transition planning in federal government organizations in a way to maximize results while avoiding detractors. Ray Plzak spoke on how ARIN is a key resource in IPv6 deployment and spoke about how easy it is to get IPv6 addresses and be involved in the ARIN community. The attendees really enjoyed the presentations and found that this information is invaluable to them as they plan their transitions to IPv6.

This year the event had both IPv4-only wireless access and IPv6-only wireless access available for attendees. The University of Denver provided the IPv4 wireless Internet access for guests. For the IPv6-only access the demonstration lab that was used in the tutorial sessions was connected over the University of Denver campus to a connection to the Front Range GigaPop (FRGP). At the FRGP there are many other connections to backbone networks and commodity Internet peers. For this event Internet2 address space was used and the attendees used IPv6-capable DNS resolvers. The only significant issue encountered that was similar to other organizations IPv6-only hour tests was that many clients only perform their DNS lookups using IPv4-only. Therefore, the demo network had to enable IPv4 and IPv6 on the local segment and a local caching dual-protocol DNS resolver was used to provide the clients with IPv6 resource records for access to the IPv6-only Internet access provided.

If you are curious you can view the presentations that were given at the IPv6 Summit on the RMv6TF dual protocol web site.
http://www.rmv6tf.org/presentations2009.htm

There are also presentations posted from the inaugural IPv6 Summit in 2008.
http://www.rmv6tf.org/presentations.htm

ScandiNode unveils IPv4 depletion site

2009-04-28T10:20:00.001+02:00

ScandiNode LLC, an IT-security and IPv6 consulting company based in Dallas, TX today announced the new ipv4depletion.com site. The site is an effort to centrally collect and provide information about the subject of IPv4 depletion and stress the urgency of migrating to IPv6. The site is updated daily and predicts when the different IPv4 address pools will run out. Today’s prediction estimates that the central IANA address pool of IPv4 addresses will be depleted by November 2010.

The site consists of four main parts:

Report – A daily updated report that compares and discusses different IPv4 depletion estimates from around the world.
Tool – An online IPv4 simulation tool where the user can create his/her own IPv4 depletion estimates by inputting assumptions about growth rates in different regions and how policies are implemented. The underlying data is updated daily.
Dashboard – A daily updated dashboard that visualizes key IPv4 depletion and IPv6 measurements.
Blog – A blog about interesting topics around IPv4 depletion and IPv6.

“I created ipv4depletion.com in an effort to create awareness and foster education in the subject of IPv4 depletion. I hope that the site proves to be a valuable resource to both IT and business professionals. Making the latest information publically available is key to expediting the migration to IPv6,” says Stephan Lagerholm, owner of ScandiNode.

The new site is available at www.ipv4depletion.com

IPv6 sessie op Overheid & ICT beurs

2009-04-21T15:28:00.004+02:00

Voor degenen die morgen op de Overheid & ICT beurs zijn: ik zal daar aanwezig zijn om samen met Gemnet informatie te geven over IPv6 en het gebruik van IPv6 bij de overheid.

De Architectuur en IPv6 sessies op de Overheid & ICT 2009 beurs zullen plaatsvinden op woensdag 22 april van in 11:30 to 12:30 in Hal 1 op Stand D074.

Air Force base prepares for IPv6 trials

2009-04-16T14:24:00.001+02:00

Network administrators and engineers at Eglin Air Force Base, Fla., expect to receive approval by the end of April to turn on IPv6 within the base network, the first time the new IP would be used within a production Air Force network.

“They have been readying the entire base network to the internal router to be able to pass both IPv4 and IPv6 traffic,” said Brent Bettis, an associate at Booz Allen Hamilton and the lead test and security engineer on the project.

Although the work is being done on a production network, IPv6 traffic will be strictly for testing at this stage, said Doug Fry, lead engineer at the Air Force’s IPv6 Transition Management Office.

“At this point, actual production traffic is not going to be considered,” Fry said. Engineers will capture and check IPv6 traffic to ensure that it is legitimate and secure and that boundaries can be enforced. “The purpose of the enclave is to show that IPv6 does no harm to the current infrastructure.”

Establishing an isolated enclave for testing is Milestone Objective 1 for the Air Force’s IPv6 transition. The next milestone would be to pass traffic between two enclaves to show that the capability is not restricted to a single site or vendor. The Air Force has not set a timetable for that step.

IPv6 is the next generation of IP and includes features to enhance security and end-to-end connectivity, and it has expanded address space to accommodate the large number of networked devices that could use these services. The government has enabled IPv6 on its network backbones but has not extended the protocols to users or required that agencies use them, although networking equipment acquired in the past five years is supposed to be IPv6-ready.

Eglin’s network control center volunteered for the challenge of being the Air Force’s first IPv6 enclave.

“We sent out a request about interest in participating in the pilot program,” Fry said. “Eglin stood up and said we will do it with our money, with your guidance.”

“They are just as eager as we are to turn this on,” Bettis said. “They want to see the new technology. This is really going to be the next generation network for the warfighter.”

Work on the project began in July 2008, when Booz Allen Hamilton began working on an inventory of the Eglin network and checking for ability to handle IPv6 traffic. The next step was deciding what needed to be turned on to enable a dual-stack network that can handle IPv4 and IPv6 traffic simultaneously and developing controls to restrict IPv6 traffic to the internal router. The ability to ensure the integrity of information on the network during testing was essential to the program, Bettis said.

Testing the security design began in October 2008. In January, the security architecture was finalized with the base's networking engineers, and equipment was tested off-line. The base is waiting for final approval for operations, expected by April 27. Traffic will be generated initially with a single Web server and a laptop PC.

Although there is no timetable for moving to the second milestone objective, Fry noted that setting up the first IPv6 enclave took nine months, and establishing a second so that traffic could be passed between the two probably also would take that long.

The first production applications using IPv6 to be deployed on Air Force networks probably would be core functions, such as e-mail and applications used in day-to-day operations, Fry said. The first applications are likely to be implemented on segregated equipment before being used on the same equipment with current IPv4 versions.

When those would be available is not yet clear, Fry said. “A lot of this will depend on vendors,” he said. “We are currently waiting for information assurance products to be certified" by the National Security Agency.

Bron: GCN

Hurricane Electric Swiftly Strengthens IPv6 Internet

2009-04-16T14:20:00.000+02:00

Hurricane Electric, the leading IPv6 Internet backbone, has become the first network in the world to connect over 400 IPv6 networks.

Hurricane Electric has quickly surpassed their Q3 2008 IPv6 peering milestone, increasing its number of connected networks by 33%. This benefits corporate customers by allowing faster IPv6 access to even more parts of the world.

"It's only a matter of time before IPv4 address space runs out completely," said Mike Leber, president of Hurricane Electric. "We're doing our part to ensure the smooth transition to the inevitable IPv6 Internet."

In addition to their network growth, Hurricane Electric is known for its services to the industry. IPv6 Self Certification and the free IPv6 tunnel broker service, located at http://tunnelbroker.net, allow network engineers, system administrators, and end users to participate in the future of the Internet.

To find out more about Hurricane Electric's push to a fully native IPv6 Internet, please visit http://ipv6.he.net

Ready or not, IPv6 is coming

2009-04-06T12:49:00.000+02:00

Google last week touted the benefits and ease of switching to IPv6, the next generation internet protocol, while the IT world in general remains resolutely indifferent about the technology.

Uptake of IPv6 is low, despite predictions that IPv4 numbers will become used up in as little as two years. A recent survey by the Internet Society found that many within a small sample of internet industry heavy hitters reckoned IPv6 uptake was being driven more by fashion than a strong business case.

That's far from a universal view, with Google amongst the strongest proponents of early adoption of the next generation internet technology.

A team of Google engineers has worked on an IPv6 transition project on a part-time basis for about 18 months. The work means that the majority of the search engine giant's applications and services have supported IPv6 (as explained here) since January. Google Maps IPv6 support was added last month.

Lees het hele artikel op: The register

Answers to 10 IPv6 questions

2009-04-03T17:27:00.002+02:00

De volgende vragen worden beantwoord op ZDNet asia:

Can you provide a simple overview of IPv6 and the differences between it and IPv4?
IPv4 and IPv6 coexistence--what does that mean?
What will happen with older machines? What devices support IPv6? What Microsoft operating systems support IPv6?
What about having IPv6 perimeter IP addresses and IPv4 IP addresses on the internal network?
How does IPv6 addressing work? Explain IPv6 IP address shorthand.
Do IPv6-ready firewalls actually work?
Will common networking tools such as Ping work with IPv6?
How does DHCPv6 work? How is it different from DHCPv4?
How does DNSv6 work? How is it different from DNSv4?
How are packets fragmented in IPv6 and how does that compare to IPv4?
What really happens to my company Internet access if it or my ISP network doesn't transition in time?
Is there some kind of a timeline for ISPs and backbone networks to implement IPv6 if it's not already in place? When do I need to start the change over process?

Online resources for IPv6 from the experts

ARIN hosts an IPv6 Wiki. This site is intended to facilitate discussion and information-sharing on IPv6 topics and issues. More information about IPv6, including general educational materials, specific registration services information, and contact information, is available at this ARIN v6 link.
Command Information has a wealth of online information at Inside IPv6. It also offers classroom training at Command Labs and Education Center.

IPv4 addresses dwindle by the day

2009-04-01T16:48:00.000+02:00

The available supply of IPv4 Internet addresses for the United States, Canada and the North Atlantic region is expected to be exhausted within roughly the next two years, based on current projections.

That’s according to data supplied by the American Registration for Internet Numbers and a widget now freely available from Intec NetCore.

The widget, which can be found in the right navigation panel on GCN.com's IPv6 portal page of GCN.com, displays the number of days remaining before ARIN is expected to run out of available IPv4 addresses. As of March 30, the number of days had dwindled to 786. ARIN is one of the five regional Internet registries in the world.

Of course, there are a virtually limitless number of new IPv6 addresses available. However, because users in the United States have grown accustomed to an abundance of the old-format addresses, most organizations have taken only tentative steps in preparing for the longer and more versatile IPv6 addresses.

Many organizations, however, may find themselves at a sudden global disadvantage when the market swings toward a more fully functional IPv6 era.

The cost of developing and maintaining systems that can efficiently process both address formats will ultimately prove costly, says Brad Boston, Cisco System’s senior vice president of global government solutions.

He notes that organizations and government agencies — especially those who depend on global supply chain logistics to run their operations — may one day find themselves becoming IPv4 islands in an IPv6-driven world.

In the meantime, GCN readers can keep an eye on the approaching day of reckoning.

Bron: GCN

IPv6 - Tale of Two Cities

2009-04-01T16:47:00.001+02:00

The Internet protocol (IP) address shortage crisis has been slowly materializing since the Internet became popular. A new numbering system, available in IP version 6 (IPv6), promises to help solve the problem, but faces significant challenges.

In the early 1990s, there were two challenges to the numbering system used to identify individual devices and networks. First, the IPv4 address space only supported 32 bits or 4.3 billion IP addresses. Second, not all IP addresses were created equal. Certain classes of IP addresses enabled an operator to create networks with far more devices than others, which led to bickering and competition for the more valuable ones. The creation of classless inter-domain routing (CIDR) in 1993 made all IP addresses more or less equal.

The next major step in helping to reduce the exhaustion of IP addresses was the advent of network address translation (NAT) in 1996. This essentially allowed a private network to reuse a single IP address across all of the devices behind the router.

While this practice reduces the number of IPv4 addresses needed, it also breaks the consistency of network routing. Hosts behind NAT routers cannot participate in some Internet protocols that require initiation of transmission control protocol (TCP) connections from the outside network or stateless protocols like user datagram protocol (UDP), which can be disrupted, unless the router has specific software to support the protocols. NAT can also complicate tunneling protocols for virtual private networks (VPNs).

Even with these advances, it appears that the number of unused IPv4 addresses is finally reaching exhaustion. Currently, only about 13 percent of the IPv4 address space remains. Estimates vary, but many predict we will run out of IPv4 addresses before 2012.

The adoption of IPv6 with a virtually limitless 128-bit address space - the number of available addresses works out to about 3.4 x 1038 or 34 followed by 37 zeroes - will solve the shortage. But the relief of the global IP address crisis comes with a complex blend of pain in enabling the new network to interoperate with the old.

In isolated networks where one operator controls all the variables, the move to IPv6 is straightforward. The challenge comes in getting the old network to talk to the new. Vendors have a number of solutions that address this problem that work well in some scenarios. But there are concerns that some of these patches could create problems down the road that will be difficult to troubleshoot or repair.

NTT's virgin success
In virgin networks, IPv6 sounds like a dream come true, with easier network deployments and fewer challenges. A case in point is NTT, Japan's incumbent telephone company and the third largest telecom in the world. An IPv6 early adopter¬ - its global NTT Com division went fully dual stack (IPv4/IPv6) in 2004¬¬ - NTT deployed an IPv6 fiber to the home (FTTH) network in March 2005, which now covers 89 percent of Japan.

There are currently more than 10 million data subscribers and hundreds of thousands of TV subscribers. The TV component, called Hikari-TV, provides 76 channels of standard definition (SD) and high definition (HD) TV, along with more than 10,000 video on demand (VOD) and 13,000 karaoke titles.

The use of IPv6 allows the network to support IP multicasting for the different TV channels. The distribution system sends one data stream for each channel to a neighborhood, which is multicast to individual homes. IPv4 can support multicast, but Cody Christman, director of product engineering for NTT America, said it is more complicated to set up because it does not provide end-to-end address transparency, and it has difficulty working across NAT.

The use of IPv6 also makes it easier to implement quality of service (QoS) so that throughput can be prioritized for each user and for applications like telephony, which require low latency. While IPv4 supports some QoS, Christman said that IPv6 provides enhancements like a flow label header that give providers more fined-grained control over how QoS features are implemented.

The only real challenge lies in providing interoperability to the outside Internet, via IPv4 tunneling. "It is different than the United States, where IPv4 is everywhere," Christman said. "In the United States, service providers are struggling to interoperate between IPv4 and IPv6 networks. This (the NTT system) is beautiful because it is a native IPv6 network, and a lot of the content is provided via IPv6 addresses."

Retrofit pain at Comcast
But the story for existing networks is not so sunny. In these cases, operators are faced with providing interoperability to customers' existing IPv4 computers, gaming systems, printers and other devices, and to the existing IPv4 devices on the Internet at large.

Alain Durand, director of Internet governance and IPv6 architecture in the office of the CTO at Comcast, has spent years crafting the best transition strategy for the largest cable operator in the United States. The company now has 16.8 million digital customers with a total of 27 million digital set-top boxes, 14.7 million cable modems, and 6.1 million phone devices on its network.

In contrast with NTT's view that IPv6 will enable all sorts of great new services and features, Comcast has a more minimalist outlook. "The only reason that IPv6 may be adopted is because we are running out of IPv4 addresses," Durand said.

"If there were enough IPv4 addresses, there would be no reason to go to IPv6. That is one of the reasons it has not been deployed more," he continued. "The No. 1 challenge is that the majority of traffic is IPv4. Changing the underlying technology is really hard. IPv6 offers more addresses and nothing else. It is not really a compelling proposal. The biggest technical challenge is that IPv4 and IPv6 are not compatible on the wire."

Vendors are starting to bring out more IPv6 products, Durand said. "One of the things the cable industry did was to recognize that IPv6 was going to be important, so a lot of work was done to bake it into new equipment standards like DOCSIS 3.0, PacketCable 2.0 and the OpenCable specifications for set-top boxes."

Comcast is exploring how to make the transition in stages. For example, it is starting out with using IPv6 to manage its network of cable modems. At this stage, only the management uses IPv6, while the Internet traffic is still IPv4. Management is the first to come out because it is easier and can operate in a contained environment.

The transition has helped Comcast understand all of the elements needed for a seamless transition.

"Comcast needed to upgrade the provision and monitoring system applications to communicate directly with the cable modems," Durand explained. "Back-office 'glue' with the billing systems is a complex part of the provisioning system. Until recently, these elements only supported IPv4. The biggest step Comcast has taken to make this work has been engaging the vendors to deliver the right pieces of software supporting IPv6."

When IPv6 first emerged, many assumed that the biggest deployment problems would be incorporating IPv6 at layer 3.

"Many believed that the hard problems with deploying IPv6 would be to deploy it on routers," Durand said. "It turned out this was much easier than expected. However, IPv6-aware applications (layer 7) were harder to find."

In the next phases, Comcast plans to enable IPv6 for Internet telephony and set-top boxes. This migration will take time.

"It is unclear in which orders the elements will come onto the network," Durand said. "We are trying to look at it in a holistic way. We will have some trials of all of those technologies in the years to come."

Bron: Cable360

OKI Enhances Service Level for its Security Gateway “CenterStage® NX4300” with Translator Function

2009-03-30T13:53:00.000+02:00

TOKYO - (Business Wire) OKI Electric Industry (TOKYO:6703) today announced it has added new functions to its security gateway “CenterStage® NX4300” which is equipped with a translator function to allow communications over different protocols, such as IPv4 and IPv6. The newly added functions include a session assurance function and premium forwarding functionality to ensure flexible user service level. These functions enable interwork between IPv4 and IPv6 and create a comfortable connection environment for IPv6 users. The product will be sold to telecom carriers in Japan using IPv6 from September 2009.

“It is expected that the inventory of IPv4 addresses will be depleted in the coming years, and as a countermeasure, it has become important to shift to IPv6. However, during the transition period, it will be necessary to implement measures to extend IPv4 network lifetimes while establishing new IPv6 networks, achieve interworking among them, and minimize the quality deterioration while interworking,” said Hidetoshi Saigou, General Manager of Carriers Business Division at OKI. “By adding two new functions to our NX4300, we believe we can offer a great connection environment to users while contributing to the smooth transition to IPv6.”

OKI’s NX4300 is a carrier-grade security gateway with a translator function to enable interwork between IPv4 and IPv6. The system adopts the ATCA(1) platform and network processor, achieving carrier-grade translator capability with high-speed processing and high-availability. OKI added a session assurance function to ensure flexible service level for users using IPv6 devices and a premium forwarding function to enable high-speed forwarding of large capacity rich content, enabling interwork between IPv4 and IPv6. In addition, the gateway offers a better connection environment when IPv6 users access existing IPv4 network resources and data center resources, because it can preferentially convert protocols and enable high-speed forwarding depending on the service level, even when the network load is high.

Going forward, OKI will enhance the function of its NX Series as a security gateway and contribute to the smooth transition to IPv6 by adding an IPv6 security function and a DPI (Deep Packet Inspection) function to accommodate the full-scale expansion of NGN(2).IPv

Google tries to break IPv6 logjam by own example

2009-03-30T10:05:00.000+02:00

SAN FRANCISCO--Although it's been hard for companies to financially justify the expense of embracing the next-generation standard for wiring together the Internet, the incentives are now arriving--and Google itself stands to benefit from the resulting democratization of networking.

Google thinks the time is ripe to begin adopting Internet Protocol version 6. The search giant, which handles gargantuan amounts of traffic, has gradually been making more of its Web properties available over IPv6, which despite being defined for more than a decade still is rare compared to the current IPv4.

The company has been gradually making its properties available over the new standard, starting with an IPv6 access to its search engine in March 2008. The range of other Google properties similarly available expanded to include Google Maps last week, said Lorenzo Colitti, a Google network engineer who spoke Wednesday at a Internet Society panel discussion at an Internet Engineering Task Force meeting here.

Lees het hele artikel op: CNet

U.S. Defense Department Certifies Juniper Networks Firewalls for IPv6 Interoperability

2009-03-30T10:04:00.000+02:00

SUNNYVALE, Calif. - (Business Wire) Juniper Networks, Inc. (NASDAQ:JNPR), the leader in high-performance networking, today announced firewall solutions that have been tested and certified as interoperable with Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPv6) by the U.S. Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) Joint Interoperability Test Command (JITC), and are now listed on the Unified Capabilities Approved Products List as IPv6 Capable. JITC is DISA’s primary agent for testing, evaluation and certifying information technology and national security systems used in joint and combined operations.

Following earlier JITC IPv6 certifications of its T Series Core Routers and M Series Multiservice Edge Routers in 2006, the IPv6-interoperability certifications of Juniper firewalls help address what many have cited to be a deterrent to IPv6 adoptions: the lack of security at the firewall or gateway level. “Ensuring security across the ever-expanding network ‘edge’ of IP access devices, assets and users is now an essential component of federal and commercial network security strategies,” said Bob Fortna, vice president, Juniper Networks Defense Sector. “Network security and resiliency is particularly critical given the rapid growth in the number and sophistication of cyber attacks on federal agency and U.S. industry networks.”

The Juniper firewall solutions receiving JITC certification as an “Information Assurance Device” include the SSG550M, SSG320M, and SSG20 Secure Services Gateways; the ISG2000 Integrated Security Gateway; and the NetScreen-5400. All have been certified with Juniper’s ScreenOS Version 6.2 software. Moreover, all are considered to be “of equivalent architecture to, and therefore a representative sample of” related families of devices, including the SSG520M, SSG350M, SSG140, and SSG5; the ISG1000; and NetScreen-5200.

“One lagging element in IPv6 adoption strategies has been on the security side, particularly in firewalls,” said Shawn McCarthy, research director, IDC Government Insights, an analyst group focused on the federal market. “Some agencies have reported that network security concerns have slowed IPv6 implementations, yet all recognize that IPv6 adoption strategies are essential to future network growth. These JITC certifications should offer reassurance to federal network managers that IPv6 adoption is not only ‘smart growth,’ but highly secure.”

The rapid convergence of IP-centric voice, data, video, web traffic and file-sharing applications (driven by concurrent explosions in demands for network access, new forms of social media, and systematic cyber attacks and viruses) is increasingly exhausting IPv4 addresses. By most estimates, IPv4 addresses will be exhausted in two to four years.

IPv6 Still on the Periphery as Time Grows Shorter

2009-03-30T10:02:00.002+02:00

Sports writers know that every spring they’ll be able to write about the upcoming baseball season, and movie critics know that there always will be new flicks to review. In the same way, tech and telecom reporters and bloggers have the luxury of knowing that there always will be the “When will IPv6 happen?” story to fall back on during days bereft of other news.

Actually, this isn't one of those days, since the Internet Society (ISOC) met this week and discussed Internet Protocol version 6. Thus there is a real reason to write about it. The protocol, sooner or later, will serve an important role. The number of Internet addresses created by Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4) -- a paltry 4.3 billion or so -- is teetering due to the growth of mobility and, to a lesser extent, Unseen M2M Communications Add up to Massive Market. IPv6 will hike the number of IP addresses to mind-boggling proportions, even beyond those associated with the cost of the bailout. Indeed, the number of address possibilities – this CNET piece put it at the number 34 followed by 33 zeros – is astonishing. Many folks, including luminaries such as Vint Cerf, suggest that it is time to finally implement the new protocol.

The CNET piece, which was a report from the meeting held in San Francisco, is well done. It delivers the important news that Google is increasingly active in the IPv6 push.

While most people consider the importance of IPv6 to be strictly to make enough numbers available, the writer quotes Google network engineer Lorenzo Colitti on a point that goes beyond pure address capacity. In order to stretch the IPv4 soup, tricks such as network address translation (NAT) and dynamic IP addresses were introduced. These approaches basically let endpoints share IP addresses. Since the beneficiaries of such workarounds are in a sense one step removed from direct contact with the Internet, they generally don’t store data themselves. Using IPv6 to give these devices an IP address of their very own, Colitti says, will make it more likely that they will host their own data and thus lead to a more fully distributed Internet.

Experts have bemoaned the shortage of IPv4 addresses for years and, in general, non-experts take them at their word. Ars Technica, which also covered the ISOC meeting, does a good job of using simple math to explain the shortage claims. The smart thinking now, the writer says, is that the IPv4 cupboard will be bare in two or three years. The good news is that the answer is here; all that needs to happen is for people to decide to use it. IPv6, the writer says, is in “maintenance mode” within the Internet Engineering Task Force. The heavy lifting now focuses on the crucial task of internetworking between systems using the two addressing schemes.

The military also recently made IPv6 news. The U.S. Department of Defense is transitioning the way in which it handles IPv6, according to Network World. In essence, until now equipment using the protocol was evaluated separately to ensure that it fulfilled the military's IPv6 requirements. That will still happen, but the military has decided that IPv6 is prevalent enough to integrate the testing into the ordinary process with which the military assesses gear. The specific nomenclature around the move: The Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) is placing IPv6 testing done by the Joint Interoperability Test Command into the Unified Capabilities Requirements process.

Vnunet.com does a good job of highlighting the reasons that IPv6 has taken off so slowly. It discusses a survey of 1,100 organizations conducted last year by the American Registry for Internet Numbers to provide insight into the impact of various issues on the speed of IPv6 deployment. The survey said 40 percent of organizations cited the desire to “get ahead of the game” as a reason to make the move, while only 13 percent cited increased user demand. Though percentages are not provided, a dearth of IT knowledge, lack of IPv4/IPv6 internetworking, and the uncertain fate of legacy applications are cited as reasons to go slow, while inherent improvements in security and better management capabilities are seen as reasons to justify deployments.

It seems that bloggers and reporters will be able to write the "whither IPv6" story for some time to come. Slowly, however, it seems that the industry is moving toward the new addressing scheme. The writers and reporters, at some point, will have to find another default story.

Bron: ITBusinessEdge

IPv6 creeps out of network core and toward the end user

2009-03-30T09:59:00.000+02:00

The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) in 1995 defined IPv6, the next generation of Internet Protocols that promises to extend the life and expand the functionality of the Internet. IETF envisioned a dual-stack transition in which the new protocols would quickly take over and IPv4 could be shut off.

“There was a problem with that strategy, in that there was no economical incentive for deployment of IPv6,” said IETF chairman Russ Housley. Hardware and software support it and networks have begun to enable it, but IPv6 has languished.

But IPv6 finally is beginning to make its way to the consumer.

“We have accepted IPv6, that it’s real and that we need to go there,” said Lorenzo Colitti, network engineer for Google, which announced in January public availability of IPv6 services. “It’s not rocket science. If you have a production-ready IPv6 network, talk to us and we can provide all the Google services over IPv6.”

Housley and Colitti participated in a panel discussion on the deployment of IPv6 hosted this week by the Internet Society at the IETF conference in San Francisco.

“The key thing we are trying to convey is that IPv6 really does represent opportunities, even in an economic situation that is pretty grim,” said Leslie Daigle, chief Internet technology officer for the Internet Society, in an interview with Government Computer News. “In IPv4 there is less opportunity. We’re at a fork in the road,” where networks must choose whether to continue supporting IPv4 with patches such as Network Address Translation (NAT), or move to the new paradigm.

Work began on IPv6 because it was becoming obvious, even in the 1980s, that the IPv4 address space would become exhausted in the foreseeable future. But changes in how the Internet is being used have extended the life and IPv4 and complicated the transition to IPv6.

“The migration path is very different than it might have been thought about first in 1994,” said Kurtis Lindqvist, chief executive officer of Netnod Internet Exchange in Stockholm. “Most of the networks out there today are capable of IPv6 being deployed, but without getting the packets out to the end users, it doesn’t help us much.”

Google, Daigle says, “is front and center” in bringing IPv6 packets to the user.

Google saw a business case for moving to IPv6 in the multitude of new non-PC devices that could use the Internet, but will not be able to get IPv4 addresses Colitti said. Enterprises have addressed this problem with NAT, but that is not practical at the consumer level.

“NAT is a small nightmare,” he said. “It’s very hard to maintain NATs. Deploying IPv6 is much simpler than just deploying layers and layers of NAT.”

Google obtained IPv6 address space in 2005 and began working on engineering and network architecture in July 2007.

The company is “engineer-driven,” Colitti said, “with a culture that allows us to start projects by spending just some of our time on them.” With a handful of people spending 20 percent of their time on it, an inexpensive pilot network was built. “Once the network was up, we saw that applications followed,” and within 18 months the company was offering Google services via IPv6.

The task of deploying IPv6 can be simplified because capabilities do not have to match those of IPv4 immediately, because traffic levels will not match those of IPv4 immediately. But once the services were announced, traffic spiked overnight, he said.

“When you do large deployments, it will just appear out of nowhere,” he said. “There is not organic growth. Last week we turned on Google maps and we saw a threefold increase overnight. So be aware of that. Do not point to the lack of traffic as the lack of an incentive for v6, because when all the pieces are in place, traffic just appears, from nowhere.”

One network provider offered some words of caution. Even when the pool of new IPv4 addresses is exhausted, IPv4 services will not dry up. “Everything that is deployed still works,” said Alain Durand, director of IP architecture for Comcast. “Don’t panic.”

New consumer gadgets eventually might offer a market for IPv6, but it has not happened yet, he said. He cited new digital cameras with built in Wi-Fi to upload photos. “It’s a really nice service, except that it’s all IPv4,” he said. Same thing with new 60-inch TVs with built-in cable modems for Web surfing. Industry must embrace IPv6, he said, but cannot abandon IPv4.

Daigle said it will not be a killer app that drives consumers to IPv6, but network performance with existing applications.

“I think what we are going to see increasingly, as more NAT and other mechanisms are deployed to keep IPv4 going, accessing existing services over IPv4 will be less compelling than accessing them with IPv6,” she said.

Bron: GCN

Why IPv6 Is Like Broccoli

2009-03-30T09:56:00.000+02:00

What's wrong with IPv6, what's right, and why none of us really has a choice, according to supporters.

The Internet is at crossroads. The current IPv4 address space is nearing exhaustion, while the next-generation IPv6 (define) addressing system dramatically expands the available address space. Yet, to date, it hasn't been widely deployed.

And despite the impending IPv4 exhaustion, the Internet Society (ISOC) has published a study in which it reported that there are no concrete business drivers for IPv6.

With all the technology has to offer, is there actually no business case for IPv6?

The ISOC, a nonprofit corporation working to promote the open development of the Internet and overseeing infrastructure standards groups like the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), is aiming to tackle that question at an IETF meeting this week.

The U.S. government is moving forward on IPv6 use, but commercial enterprises -- at least in the U.S. -- have been dragging their feet. That's frustrating, supporters say, because the adoption of IPv6 could have profound implications for the Internet as a whole, allowing for a vast new crop of Internet-connected devices and technologies.

"IPv6 is not the question -- it's the answer," Leslie Daigle, chief Internet technology officer for the ISOC, said during an IETF panel discussion on IPv6. "The question is do we want to continue to have an Internet that continues to be expanded by innovations from everywhere? In which case, we need to deploy IPv6 to continue to have global addressing."

"It's something of a broccoli technology, in that regard: It's better for you if you eat it but it's not necessarily appealing in its own right."

Lees het volledige artikel op: Internetnews

IETF: No consensus on IPv6 NATs

2009-03-30T09:54:00.000+02:00

SAN FRANCISCO – The Internet's leading standards body appears split on a controversial proposal to specify network address translators (NAT) for IPv6, the next-generation Internet Protocol that was designed to eliminate such middle boxes from the Internet infrastructure.

At a meeting held here Thursday, IETF participants said corporate network managers are demanding NAT devices for IPv6 in order to preserve private IP addressing plans and to conceal their network topologies. Most enterprises don’t want to adopt the global, end-to-end IP addressing model of IPv6, experts said.

Enterprises run NATs because they want IP address independence from their carriers, says Margaret Wasserman, product development manager with Sandstorm Enterprises and co-author of an IPv6 NAT proposal dubbed NAT66.

"The private IP addresses used inside the local network don’t need to be re-numbered when a site changes ISPs…or if there’s a merger or acquisition," Wasserman says. "Even if they have their own private address space, they don’t want to convince an ISP or pay an ISP to route it, which can be expensive and complicated."

The quandary for the IETF is that most of its participants believe NATs are bad for the Internet. So the group needs to decide whether to stick to its principles and refuse to specify IPv6 NATs, in which case vendors will build them anyway without interoperability standards. Or the IETF can specify IPv6 NATs and try to minimize the damage they cause to the Internet infrastructure.

Lees het volledige artikel op: Networkworld

Could the Internet run out of space?

2009-03-30T09:42:00.001+02:00

LONDON, England (CNN) -- When a small group of university scientists began linking computers on different campus sites at the very end of the 1960s, they had no idea that their work would one day spiral into a globally-accessible network in which the total number of pages is measured in the tens of billions.

Such has been the Internet's phenomenal and dizzying growth that much of the technology which supports it has grown organically and without much forward planning.

But what if the Internet was to run out of space? This isn't just a theoretical debate, but something experts warn could become a real issue within a few years. Now, one business school professor studying the issue believes he may have come up with a solution.

The problem isn't one of storage, but of location, the so-called IP addresses which are handed out to new sites. These are all given a unique number based on something called the IPv4 (Internet protocol version 4) standard, the system under which the web first expanded globally.

IPv4 assigns main host addresses using a system which gives around 4 billion possible combinations, a figure which at the time seemed greater than could possibly ever be used. But now the numbers are running out. A new system, IPv6, has been developed, but technical issues and a reluctance among Web companies to begin using it means it could be years before this is widely adopted.

Benjamin G. Edelman, a professor of business administration at Harvard Business School, is warning that such a bottleneck could seriously hamper the Internet, saying the Web is in danger of becoming "a victim of its own success."

If new technology businesses can't acquire sufficient IP addresses it will be difficult for them to get a foothold in the industry, he said.

"Entry and potential entry are an important part of competition. We need to make sure new firms can easily begin operations so that existing providers can't hold customers hostage."

Edelman believes he has come up with an interim solution -- a free market in defunct or unused IP addresses, of which there are many millions, which can be transferred, at a price, to new owners.

"It's unlikely that other networks would return their space for free. Why would they?" he said. "But if the price is right, they may be willing to transfer the space to someone who needs it more."

In the Web's early days, Edelman explains, when the number of IP addresses seemed inexhaustible, some networks were allocated huge numbers by the non-governmental independent regulators which control this. Some of these companies later scaled back their Internet activities or even went out of business altogether.

These unused addresses could attract a market price, bringing not only what economists call "allocative efficiency" -- moving resources to where they are most needed -- but also another benefit.

"By putting a positive price on IPv4 space, a market mechanism would remind current v4 users that their v4 space is valuable, and that they might want to try to vacate it, to the extent they can, perhaps by moving to IPv6," he said.

"A market basically tells networks: 'We will pay you to use v6 instead.' That's a transition incentive quite different from anything we've seen to date. That's a transition incentive that just might work."

Economically efficient it might be. But would this mean ordinary Web users having to pay in order to surf? Edelman believes not.

"If this transition goes smoothly, consumers should never notice. To date, IP addresses have been a trivially small part of the cost of Internet access and Web site hosting. Even if IP address prices increased 100 times, consumers still probably wouldn't notice," he said.

"The bigger worries come if Internet Service Providers just cannot expand, or just cannot enter the market. If that were to come to pass, I wouldn't be surprised to see effects on service price and quality."

Bron: CNN

Bedrijven: 'IPv6? waarom zou je?'

2009-03-26T14:34:00.000+01:00

Volgens ISOC is het gebrek aan enthousiasme bij bedrijven te wijten aan het feit dat er geen direct voordeel uit te halen valt. De ondervraagde bedrijven geven aan IPv6 weliswaar interessant te vinden, en ze beweren ook dat de vraag vanuit klanten aan het toenemen is, maar het gebrek aan direct voelbare voordelen zorgt ervoor dat ze de boot afhouden.

Een andere sleutelreden van het gebrek aan succes is het gebrek aan applicaties die het protocol ondersteunen. Vooral beheersoftware voor netwerken komt er bekaaid vanaf, ze stellen de onderzoekers in de conclusie. Specifieke applicaties worden daarbij niet genoemd.Gebrek aan technische kennis wordt ook veel genoemd.

Opvallend is dat de ondervraagden zich absoluut niet druk maken om het nakende gebrek aan IPv4 adressen, wat nou juist het punt is waar experts zich druk om maken. IPv6 is in 1998 door de Internet Engineering Taskforce aangewezen als opvolger van IPv4. Belangrijkste reden daarvoor is dat het verouderde protocol niet verder komt dan een adres van 32 bits. IPv6 kan 128 bits aan, waarmee het aantal adressen praktisch gezien oneindig is.

Met het aansluiten van steeds meer apparaten op het net, zijn ook steeds meer unieke adressen nodig, en die beginnen op te raken. Schatttingen van IANA (de Amerikaanse domeinbeheerder) stellen dat het aantal van 4,3 miljard mogelijke adressen in 2012 definitief op is. Waarschuwingen hierover zijn een regelmatig terugkerend fenomeen, en ze worden steeds luider omdat de invoercijfers overal ter wereld zeer laag zijn.

Zo zijn de in juni vorig jaar opgezette Nederlandse IPv6 Awards niet doorgegaan wegens gebrek aan animo. Het aantal inzendingen was dermate laag dat er geen sprake was van een competitie, erkent de Nederlandse IPv6 Task Force. De organisatoren zijn echter voorzichtig optimistisch over een nieuwe ronde dit jaar.

“De recente ontwikkelingen rondom IPv6 zoals het EU-besluit rondom de invoering van IPv6 in de EU en de diverse tutorials en seminars over IPv6 die plaatsvinden in Nederland scheppen de verwachting dat in 2009 het aantal IPv6-implementaties in Nederland significant zal toenemen. De jury en de IPv6 Task Force hebben besloten om in 2009 door te gaan met de IPv6 Awards en verwachten dat het aantal inzendingen een stuk hoger zal liggen.”

Gebrek aan kennis blokkeert overstap IPv6

2009-03-24T12:33:00.000+01:00

Organisaties begrijpen welke voordelen ipv6 biedt, maar stappen er toch niet op over. De belangrijkste reden is het gebrek aan technische kennis. Als organisaties de overstap hebben gemaakt, blijkt overstappen eigenlijk helemaal niet moeilijk te zijn.

Bedrijven weigeren over te stappen naar internetprotocol versie 6 (ipv6), omdat ze zeggen niet te beschikken over de technische kennis om dat te doen. Dat blijkt uit onderzoek van de Internet Society (ISOC). "Bedrijven zien het voordeel wel om over te stappen, maar als puntje bij paaltje komt, besluiten ze toch maar eerst om NAT (network address translation, red.) te doen", zegt Michiel Leenaars, woordvoerder van ISOC Nederland.

Het merendeel van de ondervraagde bedrijven zegt wel de noodzaak te zien om over te stappen op ipv6. De belangrijkste reden is dat ze meer ip-adressen nodig hebben. De andere voordelen die het nieuwe protocol biedt, bijvoorbeeld betere beveiliging, wordt minder belangrijk gevonden.

Minder moeilijk

Opvallend is dat het merendeel van de bedrijven zegt dat het gebrek aan technische kennis de reden is om niet op ipv6 over te stappen. Maar als ze de overstap eenmaal gemaakt hebben, geeft het merendeel van de ondervraagden aan dat het veel minder moeilijk was dan gedacht. Leenaars: "De leden van de ISOC, die dit onderzoek hebben ingevuld, zijn vaak de technische voorlopers. Toch kiezen ze ervoor om de makkelijkste weg te kiezen."

De ISOC vindt het onderzoek een aansporing om de kennis over ipv6 actiever te promoten. "In Nederland zitten we diep in de internetinfrastructuur. We hebben er baat bij dat iedereen het goed snapt. Dat ze niet willen overstappen op ipv6 lijkt meer op koudwatervrees."

Bron: Computable

No business case for IPv6, survey finds

2009-03-23T09:29:00.001+01:00

Business incentives are completely lacking today for upgrading to IPv6, the next generation Internet protocol, according to a survey of network operators conducted by the Internet Society (ISOC).

In a new report, ISOC says that ISPs, enterprises and network equipment vendors report that there are ``no concrete business drivers for IPv6.’’

However, survey respondents said customer demand for IPv6 is on the rise and that they are planning or deploying IPv6 because they feel it is the next major development in the evolution of the Internet.

ISOC released its survey on the same day that Google is sponsoring a two-day conference in Mountain View, Calif. for IPv6 implementers and a few days before it is hosting a panel on IPv6 adoption in San Francisco.

IPv6 is a long-anticipated upgrade to the Internet’s main communications protocol, which is known as IPv4. IPv6 was created by the Internet Engineering Task Force, a standards body that receives funding from ISOC.

IPv6 is needed because the Internet is running out of IPv4 addresses. IPv4 uses 32-bit addresses and can support approximately 4.3 billion individually addressed devices on the Internet. IPv6, on the other hand, uses 128-bit addresses and can support so many devices that only a mathematical expression -- 2 to the 128th power -- can quantify its size.

Experts predict IPv4 addresses will be gone by 2012. At that point, all ISPs, government agencies and corporations will need to support IPv6 on their backbone networks. Today, only a handful of U.S. organizations – including the federal government and a few leading-edge companies like Bechtel – have deployed IPv6 across their networks.
All of the ISOC survey respondents said they are planning for IPv6, and most have begun deployment.

IPv6 deployment remains spotty, even for organizations committed to the technology, the survey found. When asked how they were deploying IPv6, a little over half said they were deploying IPv6 on parts of their network rather than their whole network. Several respondents said they envision parts of their networks never operating with IPv6.

The survey respondents didn’t indicate that they are worried about running out of IPv4 addresses. Only one of the survey respondents is closely tracking its IPv4 address usage, saying that it needs 130,000 new IPv4 addresses every three years. Most of the respondents said they will increase their use of network address translation (NAT) technology if they can’t get more IPv4 addresses.

What’s driving network operators to IPv6 is demand from customers rather than IPv4 address depletion, the survey found. Almost half of the respondents report customer pressure to migrate to IPv6. Fewer respondents indicated a need for additional address space or the desire for simpler addressing or less complexity on their networks.

More than half of the survey respondents said that additional address space is the primary motivator for IPv6. Network operators put less weight on the auto-configuration, built-in security and mobility features that are found in IPv6.

Several respondents commented about ``how much easier they found configuring the IPv6 parts of their network compared to what they expected,’’ the ISOC report said. Others commented that ``deployment of IPv6 was relatively straightforward.’’

Most survey respondents said they are implementing IPv6 on internal and external networks. The majority said they are using a dual-stack approach, which allows IPv4 and IPv6 to run side-by-side. Fewer respondents chose tunneling, which allows IPv6 traffic to be carried in a tunnel on an IPv4 backbone.

Survey respondents said the biggest challenges they face in deploying IPv6 is a lack of technical expertise on staff followed by limited carrier and vendor support and limited security mechanisms.

Another concern cited in the survey was the lack of IPv6 support in applications and network management systems.

ISOC conducted the survey of how its 90 organizational members – including ISPs, Internet exchange point operators, enterprises, national research networks, network equipment vendors and network software vendors – via questionnaire. Twenty-two organizations responded.

Bron: Network World

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* Social Web * Email * Close Digg Slashdot Fark Stumble Reddit MIXX del.icio.us Newsvine Technorati Facebook Buzz up!

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