Google Deploys IPv6 For Internal Network

itwbennett writes "Google is four years into a project to roll out IPv6 to its entire internal employee network. At the Usenix Large Installation System Administration (LISA) conference in Boston last week, Google network engineer Irena Nikolova shared some lessons others can learn from Google's experience. For example: It requires a lot of work with vendors to get them to fix buggy and still-unfinished code. 'We should not expect something to work just because it is declared supported,' the paper accompanying the presentation concluded."

Comments

Re:IPv6

[AliasMarlowe]

Something no one would need if proper assignment of IP ranges had been done.

No point asking what you mean, since you evidently speak from ignorance. Even with optimal assignment of IPv4 addresses, it would only delay the inevitable shortfall. Sooner or later, the number of addressable end-points on the internet would exceed 4 billion. NAT is an unfortunate workaround to delay the effects of the shortfall; it should be a freely-chosen option, not an enforced requirement.

Re:IPv6

[vlm]

I'd say the address space length that they used still makes it outrageously overengineered for the time, and we're lucky they had the vision that they did.

Not really. Don't forget there is a HUGE difference between the old classfull and VLSM/CIDR/classless numbering. That gain is the whole point of spending all that effort implementing netmasks. There really were not that many possible classfull lans compared to the number of minicomputer owning businesses in the world, etc.

For the post-92ish noobs, a really simple one line explanation is the netmask used to be stored inside the address itself, so for example if the first octet was 0 to 127, that meant that LAN had to be a (presumably giant bridged) /8, first octet 128-191 meant the netmask had to be a /16, not defaulted or was a pretty good guess, but operationally "had to be".

The early years of VLSM were pretty entertaining, old timers lecturing us how a LAN addressing scheme like 1.2.3.0/24 was "impossible" and so forth.

Without VLSM we would have to have done the ipv6 conversion years before the dotcom boom, rather than a decade or so after. Not entirely sure if we'd all be better off now, or not.