IPv6 Act Now

IPv6 testing: Tips you need to know

racepoint — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 15:16:15 +0000

Today’s IPv4 networking software and hardware has been proven over time – you know how they work and you have confidence in your network. You know how many routes a specific device can hold and you know your PE routers will handle a routing update, and how much data can be forwarded because the router is working today.

The quality of IPv6 software and features in vendor equipment is unproven and largely untested. While vendors are delivering IPv6 features to their products as new hardware or software updates, these features aren’t necessarily perfect, reliable or performing properly. In this article, we consider the causes of poor IPv6 compatibility and how to address them by running a testing environment to detect problems, test vendor fixes and establish a validation process for network equipment.

You can simplify IPv6 product defects to just four primary causes:

Some IPv6 standards are still changing and updating, which requires ongoing software updates to your network hardware.
Some vendors started IPv6 development late and features aren’t completed.
Vendors don’t always have strong testing and validation processes which results in buggy software.
Existing network hardware doesn’t fully support IPv6 because, for example, the TCAM Memory architectures are tuned to 32-bit addressing which affects IPv6 performance or scalability.

With World IPv6 Launch, IPv6 on by default will be the new normal

racepoint — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 15:25:01 +0000

Some “technologies of the future” stubbornly remain in the future and resist becoming technologies of the present. Case in point: fusion energy. For a long time, IPv6 seemed to fall into that category. But now, could it finally be for real? Anyone who missed the memo: current IP addresses are 32 bits long and are running out. IPv6 fixes this with addresses that are 128 bits long. But this only works when you actually run IPv6. Last year, some big players did exactly that for one day as a test. This year, the idea is to leave it on.

I’m at the 83rd IETF meeting in Paris this week (the same Internet Engineering Task Force that created IPv6 in the first place in the 1990s). I went to my first IETF meeting in 2002. Back then there was a lot of IPv6 work going on, although there was plenty of IPv6 skepticism heard in the hallways. A decade later, IPv6 is a given. Only when I try to check Dutch news sites to see if we still have a government do I notice that I’m on the IPv6-only WiFi network. All the IETF-related pages and tools are available over IPv6 as a matter of course. That isn’t to say no IPv6-related work is going on, but that work happens in maintenance and operations working groups. In fact, the IETF leadership is now thinking about chartering a “v4exit” working group to focus on an orderly shutdown of the old IPv4 protocol.

From 80 to 8,000 – The Growth of the RIPE NCC Membership

racepoint — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 15:21:20 +0000

The RIPE NCC is 20 years old and it now has over 8,000 members. In this article we are looking at the growth curve and the composition of the membership: what industry do RIPE NCC members come from today.

The RIPE NCC became the first Regional Internet Registry in September 1992 (six months after it was set up as the secretariat for the European operators community, RIPE). During the course of 1993, the distributed IP allocation system was established in which Local Internet Registries (LIRs) received blocks of IP addresses from the RIPE NCC which were then further assigned to their customers and others who wanted to connect to the Internet.

Need to know: IPv6 explained

racepoint — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 15:19:54 +0000

According to the Office for National Statistics, SME’s make up 99.9 percent of the total number of businesses in the UK; providing 59.1 percent of all private sector jobs and generating 48.7 percent of total public sector turnover. In today’s technology driven environment, to succeed, businesses need to remain up-to-date with the latest technology. The Internet plays a critical role in business operations and as such, with the impending transition of IPv4 to IPv6, SMEs need to adopt early to reap the benefits or face the challenge of working through blank screens.

So what is IPv6 and why is it relevant to business?

Every Internet connected device has a unique identifier known as an Internet Protocol (IP) address but the current standard, IPv4, is running out and its replacement, IPv6, is not backwards compatible. This means that IPv6 must be universally adopted or connectivity problems will ensue.

As every connected device, from desktop computers to smartphones, and even some fridges and microwaves, needs an IP address. The rapid expansion of devices has meant that the four billion IPv4 addresses originally created are no longer enough. IPv6 allows for a lot more addresses (roughly 340 trillion trillion trillion in total) and guarantees the continued expansion of the Internet.

The RIPE NCC, the Regional Internet Registry for Europe, the Middle East and parts of central Asia, which is responsible for allocating IP addresses, expects to completely run out of IPv4 addresses by end of 2012. This means that businesses now need to make sure they are IPv6 ready or risk damaging their business. For instance, a company running on IPv4 may be safe for now, but when users start to come online with IPv6 only devices, the site will be inaccessible – as IPv4 and IPv6 addresses are not backwards compatible. This potential loss of custom can of course have a hugely detrimental impact on any business.

UK and US lagging on IPv6 adoption as Norway leads the way

racepoint — Wed, 14 Mar 2012 16:03:25 +0000

The UK and the US are lagging outside the top 20 nations for IPv6 adoption, despite the depletion of IPv4 addresses and widespread attempts at promoting awareness of the need to migrate to the new protocotol.

Figures released by the RIPE NCC, one of the five Regional Internet Registries (RIRs) in charge of providing blocks of IP addresses, show that the UK has an adoption rate of just 17 per cent, while the US is far behind on 9 per cent.

This compares poorly against the top adopters of Norway on 49 per cent, the Netherlands on 42 per cent and Malaysia on 28 per cent. Other European nations include Sweden (31 per cent), Germany (30 per cent) and Ireland (29 per cent).

IPv6 by the numbers

racepoint — Mon, 12 Mar 2012 11:43:15 +0000

Wednesday 6th June 2012 is World IPv6 Launch Day (no, seriously, it is) and, we have been continually reminded in a Chicken Little fashion, the IPv4 address space sky is falling. The fact that the media obsession with Internet addresses running out has been on-going for at least a decade now, fuelled no doubt by slow news days and headline space to fill, has led to something of a blasé attitude towards making the move over to IPv6. Indeed, you might be forgiven for thinking that the whole IPv6 thing had fallen by the wayside and become another Betamax technology.

This could hardly be further from the truth, and the rollout of IPv6 adoption continues to pick up pace. But just how many internet services are geared for that adoption, and how many networks are already enabled now where you live? The latter is something that RIPE NCC, one of the five Regional Internet Registries, has quite naturally been taking an interest in. Such an interest that it has developed a rather clever interactive graph that enables anyone to quickly and easily see the level of IPv6 take up in their country. Not only that, but also compare the number of IPv6 enabled networks between any number of countries on the graph by way of drop down menu selection.

Networks Announcing IPv6 – One Year Later

racepoint — Mon, 12 Mar 2012 11:19:10 +0000

About a year ago, we shared some graphs that showed the percentage of IPv6 enabled networks over time. More precisely, it showed the percentage of Autonomous Systems (ASes) that announced one or more IPv6 prefixes in the global routing table. The results for the five Regional Internet Registries (RIRs) were described in an earlier CircleID post: Uptake of IPv6 in All Regions and on RIPE Labs.

Back when those articles were posted, the percentage of ASes announcing one or more IPv6 prefixes in the five Regional Internet Registry (RIR) service regions were approximately: APNIC 10%, RIPE NCC 8.5%, LACNIC 8.5%, AfriNIC 6% and ARIN 5%.

We looked at the progress since then. In the image below you can see the current status in all regions.

IPv6 – The Independent “Man In The Middle” View

racepoint — Mon, 12 Mar 2012 11:16:17 +0000

In conversation with Axel Pawlik, MD of RIPE NCC (which is obviously better than an unripe version).

The RIPE NCC is an independent, not-for-profit membership organisation that supports the infrastructure of the Internet in Europe, the Middle East and parts of Central Asia. The most prominent activity of the RIPE NCC is to act as a Regional Internet Registry (RIR) providing global Internet resources (IPv4, IPv6) and related services to a current membership base of around 6,800 members in over 75 countries. So these guys are involved at the heart of the IPv6 movement. Here’s Axel’s views on a few key areas:

What is at the heart of the IPv4/IPv6 issue?

“Although the IANA’s pool of available IPv4 addresses is exhausted, the RIPE NCC can still assign IPv4 addresses to its members from its own reserves of IPv4 address space. We cannot predict how long this supply will last.”

“IPv4 addresses and IPv6 addresses can’t communicate directly with each other. So, before IPv6 addresses can be used to access the Internet, your organisation’s networks, services and products need to be IPv6 compatible or enabled. This requires planning and investment in time, equipment and training. New hardware and software is required to make networks ready for an IPv6-based Internet.”

IPv6 Promotional Push Will Shift Gears at CES

marita — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 16:42:49 +0000

The urgent push to move the whole of Internet addresses off of a system never intended to replace telephone, television, and computing simultaneously, and onto the IPv6 address system, is now entering its 13th consecutive blockbuster year. Despite high-level government recommendations for action plans, a global DNS poisoning scare that many say could never have happened under IPv6, and a grass-roots effort to build an actual holiday around the transition, it’s estimated that the rate at which the Asia/Pacific region is depleting IPv4 addresses is far outpacing the rate that hosts in that region are moving to IPv6.

It’s almost as if everyone wants a real Internet, but too few want to lend a hand in building it. Now the Internet Society, its original non-profit guidance organization, is stepping up its push to make IPv6 more marketable, first with the launch of a new Web site called Deploy360, to be followed up next week with meetings with consumer electronics vendors at CES in Las Vegas.

Broadcast industry must face up to IPv6 migration at last

marita — Mon, 20 Feb 2012 16:23:05 +0000

The prospect of migration from IPv4 to IPv6 has been casting a shadow over the Internet for well over a decade, and yet only recently have there been signs of much urgency among broadcasters and pay TV operators. The subject continues to receive remarkably little attention given its relevance for broadcasting, probably because it has been rumbling on so long with progress so slow. Things did pick up during 2011, when on June 8 major Internet related companies led by Facebook, Google, Yahoo, Akamai Technologies, and Limelight Networks staged World IPv6 Day, when they enabled their web sites for IPv6, primarily to raise consciousness and at the same time assess problems interworking with IPv4.

Now we are seeing some pay TV operators start making the transition, with Belgian cable operator VOO this week announcing it has selected Cisco’s dual-stack technology across its network, so that it can move towards parallel running of IPv4 and IPv6 as a prelude to an eventual full switchover in some years time. This dual-stack strategy is likely to be adopted by many broadcasters and operators, allowing IPv4 and IPv6 to coexist across the network, so that the transition can be gradual and transparent for the end customers, with no impact on operational systems or Quality of Experience.

IPv4 dates back to the mid 1970s when it became the first protocol governing routing of data across the Internet, then just an academic network. It comprises a data packet addressing scheme using 32-bit numbers often expressed as four octets in “dotted decimal” notation (e.g. 192.0.2.53). The IPv6 protocol was then developed in the mid-1990s to correct IPv4’s shortcomings, most notably the fact that a 32 bit address space can only support about four billion devices without reuse of addresses. The exhaustion of addresses that has now just occurred was anticipated then.