IPv6 Act Now

IPv6 Forum Launches the IPv6 Education Certification Logo Program

Chris — Mon, 06 Sep 2010 08:11:13 +0000

The IPv6 Forum Ready Logo Program Committee releases a new program: the IPv6 Education Certification Logo Program. This program defines and certifies courses, engineers and trainers with Silver & Gold Logo levels and requires IPv6 implementation on the web site of the education program.

A recent survey on IPv6 training and studies at universities and vendors has demonstrated that IPv6 training and courses are way too embryonic to have any critical impact. It is estimated that some 20 million engineers are working on the current Internet worldwide at ISPs, corporate and all other public and private organizations and they will need quality training on IPv6.

More at the IPv6 Forum.

The Internet is full, what now?

admin — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 09:41:44 +0000

Sometime next year the Internet as we know it will run out of IP addresses. That’s why we have IPv6, but why are so few people using it?

It sounds like another Y2K type scenario doesn’t it? James Spenceley, the CEO of Vocus, says the analogy is closer to when we ran out of phone numbers. We fixed the problem by adding an extra digit. Paul Brooks, principal at Layer10 Consulting, says this time we’re creating enough addresses to give one to each grain of sand in the galaxy. That’s probably enough to be going on with. I talk to them both on Twisted Wire this week, to see what needs to change to make the move to IPv6.

IPv6 deployment

admin — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 09:07:46 +0000

On a whim, I decided to deploy IPv6. And all I can say is: It’s a lot easier than you think. I’m writing down a few notes here from the non-network-engineer’s point of view. This is supposed to be the first from a series of postings about my IPv6 deployment.

IPv6 is being deployed but not in the expected places

admin — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 08:16:11 +0000

IPv6 exists for more than 15 years and it is rumored to be deployed extensively in Asia and especially in Japan and China with Africa being the last continent to deploy IPv6. Another place where there should be a lot of deployments is of course in the USA with the US Government IPv6 mandates.

But, when it comes to measure where web sites are actually deployed over IPv6, the rumor proves to be just a myth. There are multiple studies and researches looking for which web site is reachable over IPv6 and whether the site has a AAAA record in the DNS (AAAA is resource record for an IPv6 address). For a couple of months, I have run yet-another-version of this IPv6-readiness survey for major web sites in several countries (checking the 50 most popular sites in several countries).

Verizon: Businesses need move on IPv6

admin — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 09:37:39 +0000

Verizon Business has a message to companies still reluctant to migrate their networks to IPv6: You’re better off doing it now than later.

William Schmidlapp, Verizon Business’s product manager for Internet dedicated access services, says that the advent of 4G LTE and WiMAX-based devices will only increase the need to switch over to IPv6, since each of those devices will require its own IP address. So if any company wants to push its content out to mobile devices over the next few years, they’re going to need some capability to handle IPv6 traffic.

Suggestion for Internet search engines: “Proposed IPv6 impact on search engine scoring algorithms”

admin — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 10:00:00 +0000

At IETF76 in Maastricht I had a long discussion with Sander Steffann, IPv6 advocate and RIPE Address Policy WG co-chair. We talked about my idea, how could Google and all other search engines really trigger massive transition of internet content (and content providers) to IPv6. After long discussion Sander managed to put the idea into text.

Trouble looms for company websites

admin — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 09:44:10 +0000

How would you like it if customers had to log in at your e-commerce site over and over during the same session? Or if you couldn’t tell where site visitors were from? What would you think if you sounded as if you had a speech impediment during a streaming-video press conference?

Those are just a few examples, among many, of the troubles that could befall companies for a period of days, weeks, or even months sometime during 2011 if they don’t act soon to reconfigure their public-facing Web servers.

The source of the problem is the impending exhaustion of the unique numbers (or addresses) within the long-established Internet protocol that Internet service providers (ISPs) assign for every Website and most connected devices.

How do they do IT: Microsoft’s Tech.Ed goes IPv6

admin — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 08:02:43 +0000

Microsoft’s annual event for IT professionals, Tech.Ed, will this year deploy IPv6 (Internet Protocol version 6) for the first time in an effort to drive education and awareness about the technology.

Microsoft Australia’s Web platform evangelist, Jorke Odolphi, said whole industries were currently viewing IPv6 as “a bit too hard” and were unsure of how the next generation protocol worked.

“There’s been a lot of talk about IPv4 being depleted and reached exhaustion, saying the internet is getting full and that’s one way of thinking about it,” Odolphi said.

What is IPv6?

admin — Thu, 12 Aug 2010 07:38:40 +0000

IPv6 refers to Internet Protocol version 6, a new set of specifications computers can use to identify themselves and communicate with other computers over the Internet. It is the immediate planned successor to the current specification, IPv4 (Internet Protocol version 4). IPv6 is expected to become the common standard for Internet connections in the next several years as a result of the impending shortage of IPv4 addresses.

The Internet Protocol (IP) is a standard which computers use to identify themselves and exchange groups of data, known as packets, over the Internet. When the first version of the Internet, the ARPANet, was first designed, it was intended to be decentralized enough to cope with the destruction of a nuclear war – meaning that two computers could communicate with one another through a vast web of interconnections without having to follow a single specific path, or even to follow the same path twice.

Psst – interested in some lightly-used IP addresses?

admin — Tue, 10 Aug 2010 09:40:31 +0000

The Internet Service Provider (ISP) community is carefully watching the impending depletion of the unassigned IPv4 address pool. Most estimates place the depletion of the central pool of unassigned IPv4 addresses by mid-2011. After that, each Regional Internet Registry (RIR) will continue to satisfy requests for additional IPv4 space for a limited time (depending on the rate of incoming requests and the amount of address space on hand in the RIR at the time of central pool depletion).

To continue growing, ISPs require access to a steady stream of IP addresses to connect new customers. In ARIN’s service region (Canada, the United States, and parts of the Caribbean), allocation policies have resulted in growing ISPs requesting additional IP addresses every 6 to 12 months. These policies emphasize that addresses are available based on documented need per community-developed criteria; similar policies exist in the four RIRs serving the other regions of the globe.