Category: IPv6

While researching for another blog post, I stumbled upon this speech by Winston Churchill:

When the situation was manageable it was neglected, and now that it is thoroughly out of hand we apply too late the remedies which then might have effected a cure. There is nothing new in the story. It is as old as the Sibylline Books. It falls into that long, dismal catalogue of the fruitlessness of experience and the confirmed unteachability of mankind. Want of foresight, unwillingness to act when action would be simple and effective, lack of clear thinking, confusion of counsel until the emergency comes, until self-preservation strikes its jarring gong -these are the features which constitute the endless repetition of history.

Obviously mr. Churchill wasn't talking about IPv6 but about way more serious matters… but it's also obvious he was right abut the unteachability of mankind.

Whenever you talk to a new startup evaluating whether you’d consider including their products in your network, don’t forget to ask them a fundamental question: “does your product support IPv6?”

If they reply “Nobody has ever asked for it”, it’s time to turn around and run away.

The OSCON keynote by Simon Wardley explains a number of things, including (lack of) enterprise IPv6 adoption. Enjoy!

35 years ago, mainframes, single-protocol networks (be it SNA or DECnet), and centralized architectures that would make hard-core SDN evangelists gloat with unbridled pride were all the rage. If you’re old enough to remember IBM SNA, you know what I’m talking about.

A few years later, everything changed.

Like all other ipSpace.net webinars, the IPv6 Microsegmentation webinar starts with a brief description of the problem we’re trying to solve: the IPv6 first-hop security challenges.

For an overview of this problem, watch this free video from the IPv6 microsegmentation webinar, for more details, watch the IPv6 Security webinar.

While some people lament the lack of IPv6 business case, others are busy rolling it out – you (RFC 2119) SHOULD check out the Status of Swisscom’s IPv6 Activities presentation from recent Swiss IPv6 summit.

Geoff Huston published an interesting number-crunching exercise in his latest IPv6-focused blog post: 8% of the value of the global Internet (GDP-adjusted number of eyeballs) is already on IPv6, and a third of the top-30 providers (which control 43% of the Internet value) have deployed large-scale IPv6.

The message is clear: The big players have moved on. Who cares about the long tail?

Hank left a lovely comment on my Rearchitecting L3-Only Networks blog post:

What you describe is literally intra-area routing in CLNS.

He’s absolutely right (and I admitted as much during my IPv6 Microsegmentation presentations @ Troopers 15).

Great news for everyone trying to deploy IPv6 in OpenStack: the Kilo release has full support for IPv6 in the tenant networks, including SLAAC, stateless and stateful DHCPv6. For more details, read an extensive blog post by Shannon McFarland.

One of the topics I discussed in the IPv6 High Availability webinar is the problem of dual-stack deployments – what do you do when the end-to-end path for one of the protocol stacks breaks down. Happy eyeballs is one of the solutions, as is IPv6-only data center (Facebook is moving in that direction really fast). For more details, watch the short End-to-End High Availability in Dual Stack Networks video available with Free Subscription.

One of my readers was reading the Preparing an IPv6 Addressing Plan document on RIPE web site, and found that the document proposes two approaches to IPv6 addressing: encode location in high-order bits and subnet type in low-order bits (the traditional approach) or encode subnet type in high-order bits and location in low-order bits (totally counter intuitive to most networking engineers). His obvious question was: “Is anyone using type-first addressing in production network?”

Terastream project seems to be using service-first format; if you’re doing something similar, please leave a comment!

The video of my Troopers 15 IPv6 Microsegmentation presentation has been published on YouTube. As with the Automating Network Security video, it’s hard to read the slides; you might want to look at the slide deck on my public content web site.

You’ll find more about this topic, including tested Cisco IOS configurations, in IPv6 Microsegmentation webinar.

An interesting message appeared on v6ops mailing list a few days ago: the first interconnect between independent IPv6 implementations was established 20 years ago. No wonder some youngsters who don't know any better treat this venerable protocol like a modem and ignore it in favor of IPv4 ;)

I was talking and writing about IPv6 myths for years, but like any good myth they tend to be pretty robust. Unfortunately, as I explained in the IPv6 Myths and Reality part of IPv6 High Availability Strategies webinar, the reality seems pretty bleak: all we got are longer addresses, half-baked protocols, unsolved challenges, and heaps of confusion.

The IPv6 Security Summit at the Troopers conference always has a few awesome IPv6 presentations (many people claim Troopers is the conference to attend if you’re serious about IPv6), and this year was no exception. A day after the MLD bashing, Enno Rey delivered a great in-depth presentation on DHCPv6 features and shortcomings.

It seems the DHCPv6 intricacies presented in that talk were too much for some of the attendees – that afternoon I accidentally stumbled upon a visibly distressed gentleman who started our chat with “How could anyone expect us to deploy IPv6 in a production environment?”