IPv6 Act Now

Sahara Net will host the sixth meeting of the Middle East Network Operators Group (MENOG 6) from 10-14 April 2010 in the Riyadh Sheraton Hotel, Saudi Arabia. MENOG 6 is supported by the RIPE NCC, the Regional Internet Registry for Europe, the Middle East and parts of Central Asia.

MENOG is a forum that brings together businesses, network operators and the technical community to discuss critical Internet issues affecting the Middle East region. The five-day event is an opportunity to exchange ideas, share best practices and identify opportunities for regional cooperation.

One of the central topics to be discussed at MENOG 6 is the depletion of IPv4 addresses. There is now less than 10 percent of global pool of IPv4 addresses available, highlighting the need for network operators and other organisations to accelerate the adoption of the next generation of IP addressing, IPv6.

Kais Alessa, engineer and Operations Manager at Sahara Net and a member of the Executive Committee of MENOG, says: “Attending a MENOG meeting helps you keep up-to-date with the latest technological advancements in this fast-moving sector. MENOG and its counterparts in North America (NANOG) and Southern Asia (SANOG) play an important role in supporting the growth and development of regional networks.”

Axel Pawlik, Managing Director of the RIPE NCC, comments: “Ensuring a sustainable growth of networks in the Middle East helps protect economic growth in the region. Close collaboration in the Internet community and regional initiatives such as MENOG 6 help raise awareness of the importance of IPv6 adoption and its role in safeguarding the global Internet economy.”

The agenda for MENOG 6 includes presentations, tutorials and workshops on IPv6, routing and the Domain Name System (DNS), which will be presented by international experts. The meeting is open to anyone with an interest in the Internet and networking. Attendance costs $50.

For further information, go to:
http://www.menog.net/meetings/menog6/

Sheng Jiang (Huawei) and Brian Carpenter (University of Auckland, research consultant to Huawei) are currently running a questionnaire on IPv6 deployment, addressed to every ISP. The purpose is to provide facts for a document about deployment scenarios that we are drafting for discussion in the IETF.

All responses will be kept strictly confidential and the study’s authors will publish only combined results, with no information about individual ISPs in any published results. You can also request that neither you, nor your ISP, be mentioned in the acknowledgments.

Please find the questionnaire at
http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~brian/ISP-v6-QQ.html

Answers are requested ASAP.

The American Registry for Internet Numbers says that IPv4 (Internet Protocol version 4) addresses—all 4,294,967,296 of them—will run out sometime in 2012. Will that mark the end of the Internet as we know it? Hardly.

Organizations are already in the process of getting ready to roll over to a new addressing scheme, Internet Protocol version 6. Is your enterprise prepared?

More from Processor…

2010 has been signposted as a watershed year for the migration to IPv6 by Australian ISPs, governments and enterprises.

Speaking to Computerworld after the Australian IPv6 Summit 2009 held earlier this week in Melbourne, Asia Pacific Network Information Centre (APNIC) director general Paul Wilson said the conversation had moved on from mere promotion to real world trials.

More from ComputerWorld Australia…

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…

I’ve previously written about the problem with IPv4 /8s which have been used to number IP networks in an unofficial and improper way.

The problem is that the unofficial usage makes it more difficult for ISPs to bring these addresses into use when they are officially allocated and so less desirable. But we have to allocate IPv4 addresses to the RIRs as long as we still have them and they still request them. We just need to implement a mechanism to select which /8 is allocated to which RIR.

More from ICANN blog…

We’ve known we would run out of IPv4 addresses since 1981, when the Internet Protocol was standardized. The numbers dictate that there will never be more than 4,294,967,296 different IPv4 addresses. (4 billion and change being the number of combinations that can be made with IPv4’s 32 address bits). Before 1993, addresses were given out in very large blocks because of technical limitations in routing protocols. This limitation was lifted, but around the same time, the Internet started to become more mainstream, requiring more and more addresses.

This was also the moment the IETF realized that at some point, we’d run out of IP addresses. Its estimated date for the well to run dry was 2005. Although they got the year wrong, they were right about their notion that 32 bits wasn’t enough for the decades to come.

More from ars technica…

Global Internet Number Resource Policies are defined by the ASO MOU – between ICANN and the NRO – as “Internet number resource policies that have the agreement of all RIRs according to their policy development processes and ICANN, and require specific actions or outcomes on the part of IANA or any other external ICANN-related body in order to be implemented”. Attachment A of this MOU describes the Development Process of Global Internet Number Resource Policies, including the adoption by every RIR of a global policy to be forwarded to the ICANN Board by the ASO, as well as its ratification by the ICANN Board. In this context, the ICANN Board adopted its own Procedures for the Review of Internet Number Resource Policies Forwarded by the ASO for Ratification.

More from Domains Finder…

The China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) and APNIC Pty Ltd recently signed a cooperation memorandum to jointly handle new Internet-related issues such as IPv4 address depletion, the IPv4 to IPv6 transition and domain name system security.

More from People’s Daily Online…

The China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) and APNIC Pty Ltd recently signed a cooperation memorandum to jointly handle new Internet-related issues such as IPv4 address depletion, the IPv4 to IPv6 transition and domain name system security.

It is understood that on the basis of the current annual usage of almost 200 million IP addresses and a 19 percent annual growth in IP address usage, there will be no IP addresses left in the world by around 2012.

More from People’s Daily Online…