IPv6 Act Now

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).

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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.

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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.

More from go6…

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

More from CircleID…

The [US] Navy is ahead of the curve as the Defense Department gradually converts over to IP Version 6 from the current protocol, IPv4. While the government, the private sector and much of the world has been slowly transitioning to IPv6 for almost a decade, the Navy’s Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center Pacific has been operating a fully integrated IPv6 environment on a daily basis since 2003.

Lessons learned from the center’s operation will help other government agencies and commercial organizations make an easier transition to IPv6, said Ron Broersma, SPAWAR’s enterprise network security manager and chief information technology division engineer. A major transition to IPv6 will soon begin, as the number of IPv4 Internet addresses is expected to run out sometime in 2012, if not sooner. IPv4 uses the familair four sets of three numbers each to define an IP address, allowing for only about 4.3 billion unique addresses. IPv6 uses a much larger address space, and offers a near-unlimited number.

More from Government Computing News…

IP, the Internet Protocol, is one of the pillars which support the Internet. Almost 20 years old, first specified in a remarkably concise 45 pages in RFC 791, IP is the network-layer protocol for the Internet.

In 1991, the IETF decided that the current version of IP, called IPv4, had outlived its design. The new version of IP, called either IPng (Next Generation) or IPv6 (version 6), was the result of a long and tumultuous process which came to a head in 1994, when the IETF gave a clear direction for IPv6. IPv6 is designed to solve the problems of IPv4. It does so by creating a new version of the protocol which serves the function of IPv4, but without the same limitations of IPv4. IPv6 is not totally different from IPv4: what you have learned in IPv4 will be valuable when you deploy IPv6. The differences between IPv6 and IPv4 are in five major areas: addressing and routing, security, network address translation, administrative workload, and support for mobile devices. IPv6 also includes an important feature: a set of possible

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IPv6 is considered the future successor of the old internet protocol, IPv4. Although Ipv6 has began serving in the current time, IPv4 is still the main controller of the market. Yet, IPv4 is suffering from a serious exhaustion and problems which are giving focus to the upcoming IPv6.

Both IPv6 and IPv4 are Internet protocols for addresses. This means that each of them is a numerical system which allows each computer connected to the internet to be recognized by a specific IP address. This is an essential role for the internet since computers communicate using numbers rather than names. Yet, humans have developed the DNS (domain name system) to solve the problems associated with interacting with the Internet Protocols. In fact, domain names are simply alpha-numerical combinations stored in specific servers and each pointing to a specific IP address. For instance, when a user calls the

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