IPv6 Act Now

The first two laboratories have recently completed accreditation to provide testing services for the USGv6 Program. The USGv6 Program, developed at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, provides the basis for expressing U.S. government requirements for Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) technologies and for testing that commercial products meet those requirements. The availability of commercial testing services is an important step towards the U.S. government’s use of USGv6 acquisition tools, beginning in July 2010.

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The National Insitute Of Standards And Technology (NIST) announces the public comment release of Special Publication (SP) 800-119, Guidelines for the Secure Deployment of IPv6. IPv6 (Internet Protocol version 6) is the next generation Internet Protocol, accommodating vastly increased address space. This document describes and analyzes IPv6’s new and expanded protocols, services, and capabilities, including addressing, DNS, routing, mobility, quality of service, multihoming, and IPsec.

Read the document and comment here.

The European Commission has started an research project with TNO and GNKS to find the causes for a slow IPv6 deployment by looking at bottlenecks and the arguments that are used when talking about IPv6 deployment.

On www.ipv6monitoring.eu they will publish their project results and collect the feedback and ideas that you, and others who are concerned with IPv6, are willing to share.

More from Fix6…

The University of New Hampshire’s test lab is among the first wave of labs to be accredited to test networking products for compliance with government specifications for Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6), which will be required for government procurements this year.

The university’s InterOperability Laboratory (NH-IOL), an industry-funded independent test lab, is a pioneer in IPv6 development and was one of the organizations working with the National Institute of Standards and Technology to develop test specifications for the USGv6 profile. The lab was accredited by the American Association for Laboratory Accreditation (A2LA), a nonprofit, nongovernmental membership society designated by NIST to accredit labs for USGv6 testing.

More from Government Computer News…

Corporations and government agencies must IPv6-enable their public-facing Web sites in the next 24 months or risk upsetting a growing number of visitors with lower-grade connectivity.

“The drop-dead deadline for external Web sites to support IPv6 is January 1, 2012,” warns John Curran, President and CEO of the American Registry for Internet Numbers, which distributes blocks of IP addresses to North American ISPs and other network operators. “When we get to the end of 2011, we’re going to have a lot of people connecting over IPv6 and that doesn’t bode well for the content providers who don’t support IPv6.”

More from Network World…

BT Diamond IP, a leading provider of software and appliance products and services that help customers effectively manage complex Internet Protocol (IP) networks, today announced the awarding of U.S. Patent 7,623,547 for “Internet Protocol Address Management System and Method.”

This patent describes an IP Address Management (IPAM) system which supports both IPv4 and IPv6 address space using a unique hierarchical container structure and block allocation techniques. The structure and techniques have been implemented in BT Diamond IP products, initially in the NetControl product and in its successor, IPControl.

More from CNN Money…

After a slow start, New Zealand is poised to accelerate implementation of the next generation Internet protocol, IPv6, with the formation of the New Zealand IPv6 Task Force.

The task force will assume and expand on the work of the NZ IPv6 Steering Group, an across-industry group convened by independent consultant Dr Murray Milner – who has been appointed convenor of the task force – and supported by the Ministry of Economic Development and InternetNZ.

More from iTWire…

The RIPE NCC has published an analysis of trends in IPv6 “tunneling” (IPv6 traffic transiting across IPv4 connections) in the Internet over the past five years. The results give some promising indications for the deployment of IPv6 in the global Internet.

For details, see RIPE Labs…

IPv6 slowly seems to become more mainstream, we hear about IPv6 more and more and it seems that at least some Service providers and governments understand that there is a sense of urgency. Regularly we see the statements of networks that are planning to roll out IPv6 and vendors that are promising to make their products IPv6 ready.

But talk is cheap and the question remains, how far are we actually with rolling out IPv6 deployment? We tried to answer that question by looking at the Internet Routing tables.

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The first test specifications for IPv6 compliance, which will be required for government networking procurements beginning next July, have been released for public comment by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).

After a 30-day public comment period, NIST expects to publish by the end of the year the revised test suites that make up the initial test program.

More from Government Computer News…