Google Engineers Say IPv6 Is Easy, Not Expensive

alphadogg writes "Google engineers say it was not expensive and required only a small team of developers to enable all of the company's applications to support IPv6, a long-anticipated upgrade to the Internet's main communications protocol. 'We can provide all Google services over IPv6,' said Google network engineer Lorenzo Colitti during a panel discussion held in San Francisco Tuesday at a meeting of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). Colitti said a 'small, core team' spent 18 months enabling IPv6, from the initial network architecture and software engineering work, through a pilot phase, until Google over IPv6 was made publicly available. Google engineers worked on the IPv6 effort as a 20% project — meaning it was in addition to their regular work — from July 2007 until January 2009."

Comments

Re:easy?

[Bert64]

How big is Google's network compared to most companies?
And also consider the people doing this weren't working on it full time and were a relatively small team.

The hardest part of deploying IPv6 is actually getting IPv6 network transit... Very few ISPs will offer it, or charge a high premium for it ontop of their ipv4 charges such that it isn't worth the expense.

Re:easy?

[at_slashdot]

Everything is easy for a team of PhDs that has free time on their hands.

Re:easy?

[Anonymous Coward]

At 20% of 18 months is for google with its tens of thousands of computers.

I have IPv6 at my home and I got it set up in maybe 3 hours at the most, and that is with one person, 15 computers, 2 routers, and setting up a DNS server.

Gateway/Routers?

[Midnight Thunder]

Does anyone have a list of current networking hardware that is IPv6 ready? Specifically I am interested in any gateway/routers that support IPv6 out of the box, in the sub-$200 category.

I know about DD-WRT, but I don't want to have spend time hacking my router.

Re:With NAT, who cares?

[TheThiefMaster]

NAT is fine for desktops, but you'll be complaining quite a lot when IPv4 addresses run short enough that you have to start NAT'ing servers...

Re:Corporate users

[idiotnot]

NAT (or more correctly in most cases PAT) is not a security feature.

More pushback comes from security-mastar types, who've been trained in an IPv4-only world. IPv6 forces them to do two things they hate doing: a) properly secure perimeter devices, and b) ensure that each host is secure.

A lot of it, of course, stems from the Win9x/NT4/2k days, when outbreaks on internal networks caused major business disruptions.

Re:Not easy, and not the core problem

[xaxa]

On Ubuntu (so presumably Debian too) I just did
aptitude install miredo
invoke-rc.d miredo start

Then it just worked:
$ ping6 ipv6.google.com
PING ipv6.google.com(2001:4860:a003::68) 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 2001:4860:a003::68: icmp_seq=2 ttl=60 time=37.8 ms

wget -6 http://ipv6.google.com/

Re:easy?

[Repossessed]

There are sometimes compatibility issues with moving to something new.

I've spoken to one company who uses windows 98 machines, because their inventory system is on legacy software that requires windows 98, and the company who made that software went tits up. Since the software uses a proprietary binary format, its beyond the means of the company to switch to something new, even though there are affordable, and better, options.

This incidentally, is my biggest reason to push for FOSS, or at the least open standards, in the workplace, if you don't control the code, you can get royally screwed, either from a company going under, or declaring that your updates now cost 3 grand a license, even MS has dropped support for a format they created a time or two.