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What's Your Timeline for IPv6 Migration?
SgtChaireBourne asks: "IPv4 has, over the last 20 years, seen unexpectedly wide adoption. During this time it's proven to be both flexible and robust, but also several problems, though once small, have grown. IPv6 looks to solve some scalability problems, add needed privacy and authentication mechanisms, address quality of service, and provide better routing and addressing capabilities. What kind of timeline does your site/institution/business have for rolling out IPv6 and how?" Those interested in IPv6 migration may also be interested in this article, from a year ago.
Here are some helpful links:
IPv4 Policies
IPv6 Policies
One way they can switch without significant down time is to roll out the changes over time. Essentially they have two options: Dual stack: routers that support both IPv4 and IPv6. The routers speak v4 to v4 routers, and v6 to other routers. Encapsulation: routers can encapsulate IPv6 packets in IPv4 packets and then tunnel the encapsulated packet to other IPv6 routers via IPv4 routers.
A large number of providers offer IPv6 support today. NTT/Verio has been offering this as a Commercial Service for quite some time, as well as through the domestic provider OCN and the OCN DSL services. As the 6bone tunneled networks go away, there is ongoing native support being added to networks. IETF and other conferences have been supporting providers that offer native IPv6 services. Aside from the always behind the ball DSL/Cable providers in the edge provider space of multicast, IPv6, etc.. you can contact any of the Tier-1 networks to obtain IPv6 services. Likely for free and not out of the 3FFE space. Build IPv6 into your kernels, ask your service providers for IPv6 and encourage them to provide these to you for little/no additional cost. Juniper and Cisco routers currently offer IPv6 in their current software releases. Now that Cisco has acquired Linksys, hopefully they will assist in providing support for these services in the edge-router space.
IPv6 is also available for Win2k, which doesn't make it such an unbelievable proposition...
Except that the IPv6 stack from Microsoft for Win2k can't query IPv6-only DNS servers. It understands AAAA records, but you still need your DNS server accessible over IPv4 in order to actually query them...
The major operating systems out there are now deployable with IPv6 support. The major infrastructure vendors (Cisco and the like) are ready. The big limitation as I see it right now is software. More network-aware software needs to be address family agnostic.
The path forward for software developers is fairly straightforward:
Making software address-family agile should not impact your IPv4 users at all. Why not do it the right way now so you don't have to re-do it later?
It is coming.
I'm mostly there. My network and systems are all dual IPv4 and IPv6. The problem I've been running up against is that there are no DSL or small-office/home-office-type providers in my area that support IPv6! Most of the people I speak to at my current ISP (SBC) don't even know what it is (had to call them, my 4 or 5 e-mails about it have all gone totally unanswered), and finally when I get ahold of someone in the "emerging products" group, they say they have no idea if/when it will ever be available. I can't even sign up to help test it.
So for now I'm stuck working through a tunnel broker with terrible latency. Basically, I'm still doing everything with IPv4 that's not on the LAN.
Microsoft is well ahead there. They have been doing IPv6 stuff for years. Of course you still can't do anything with it and there is no DNS support and nobody seems to have a transition plan worth a damn, but you cannot blame Microsoft.
The real blame for IPv6, DNSSEC and IPSEC being nowhere is the IETF. And before ACs come back telling me that IPSEC is widely used for VPNs, yes I know, but a VPN is not what IPSEC is designed for. IPSEC was intended to be INTERNET security.
Rough Consensus and running code may have been fine when the IETF bigwigs were in their 20s and 30s. These days they are in their 50s and 60s and it really shows. The place has been a talking shop for has beens for years.
What is interesting is the number of folk who are NOT involved with IETF anymore. I have not seen Vint Cerf there for years, nor David Clark or Ron Rivest. Tim Berners-Lee has not been there for at least eight years and it is four years since I saw any W3C staff there. The hip venue these days is OASIS, you can get a spec finished in less than 2 years in OASIS - and when it is done it does not look like some shite that came off a teletype.
The folk in charge at the IETF these days are the second stringers, not the visionaries. They simply do not have what it takes to deploy IPv6 and they are scared of making a bad choice so they make no choices at all which is usually the worst choice.
The only major companies still involved in IETF in a big way are CISCO and Microsoft. And Microsoft is only there because they feel they need the cover. There are some Sun engineers still attending, but that seems to be as much as anything to keep their visibility up and their resume looking fresh.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
What about RFC 1886?
BIND can support AAAA records, it is a matter of wider adoption, but there certainly is support. I once wrote a zone file editor that included plenty of support for v6.
You have to just jump in! I too am already using IPv6 comfortably alongside my routed IPv4 network. I actually forced myself to start using it just 'cause, and it's wonderful. The autoconfiguration features are worth it alone. And I have a mixed network of Linux, AIX, HP-UX, Windows 2000, and Cisco. My bind/DNS is configured for IPv6, my sendmail is configured for IPv6, and so on. But the underlying IPv4 network is still there right along side. There's really no reason to not go ahead and start experimenting with IPv6, to get comfortable with it before you depend on it.
Actually my excuse to start playing with it was I was developing an application which could make use of multicasting. And let me tell you, IPv6 multicasting is a dream come true when compared with IPv4! And the sockets-API is much more sane and complete, after all the IETF learned from the shortcomings of the IPv4 API. See these wonderful resources and just jump in!
So now that I'm enjoying it, I've been seeking out open source applications that use IPv4 and providing assistance to the developers to get them compatible with IPv6. A lot of the smaller projects in particular could use help, as some of them are unnecessarily tied to the IPv4 stack and probably don't even know it nor know anything about IPv6. I also suggest that anybody with some expertise to lend a hand as well. The open source/free software community can not find itself falling being here.