A marathon day
Day 2 of the IPv6 conference was actually pretty good. It was a ‘marathon’ day of +10hrs of presentations and panel discussions. Unfortunately during the last ‘talking heads’ sessions the best part of me already left the building and concentration dropped. Nonetheless it was a good day and the welcome drinks+bites at the end of the day were rewarding 
The opening speech
was done by John Curran, the founder and president of ARIN (the American Internet Registrar, the equivalent of the European RIPE organization). John was involved in IPng the early RFCs of what eventually became known as IPv6. How cool is that!?
My collegue Erwin Blekkenhorst (maintainer of IPv6.net) also tweeted a lot of interesting remarks and sound bites. Follow ‘@ipv6dotnet’ for getting those tweets.
During the panel discussions several companies shared their views and experiences on the IPv6 implementation and IPv4 to IPv6 transition. Better said co-existence or ‘dual stack’ providing your services via IPv4 and IPv6 in parallel.
I will not bore you with an exhaustive summary (send me a message and I will) of each presentation but I’d like to condense it into a) it’s interesting and worthwhile being at this conference and b) I feel that this is the environment were ‘it’ actually happens; the Internet industry adopting IPv6.
My conclusions
of the second day would be:
- Moving from IPv4 to IPv6 is inevitable. Not being part of it is basically ‘missing the boat’ and loosing the competitive advantage.
- Be preprared before actually implementing IPv6. Have a sound strategy resp implementation plan.
- Implementing IPv6 is a ‘journey‘. Take it on a step by step basis and learn as you go and grow.
- Dispite that many (hw or sw) vendors say that they support IPv6 they do not always interop as you’d expect.
- So in addition; try before you die (i.e. perform a POC ensuring that your design is providing what you aim for. Feed the findings back to the hw/sw vendors.
- Expect to spend a lot of time on awareness and training. Knowledge on IPv6 is the critical success factor.
- From a Schuberg Philis IPv6 Task Force perspective we seem to be aligned with what the industry as a whole is doing; we are part of the IPv6 community for some time now and are already enabled on connectivity level. Application layer IPv6 is our next challenge.
- I believe it is important that Schuberg Philis and our customers who are able to participate are part of the IPv6 World Day June 6, 2012. Let’s go for it!
The FUTURE is NOW!
I’m visiting the V6 World Congress 2012 together with collegue Erwin Blekkenhorst (a long time IPv6 adept and owner of ipv6.net as well as its corresponding Facebook web page). This IPv6 congress is held Feb 7-10 in Paris, France.
Central question of this congress is: “Enterprises Migration: How and When?”
Amongst others, both Erwin and me are IPv6 task force members within Schuberg Philis and we are determined to increase the IPv6 awareness with our fellow collegues and our customers. The questions we would like to address are: How will it impact us, our business and what will it mean to our customers, what are the ways to ‘migrate’ safely from IPv4 to IPv6 resp to operate a dual stack setup?
On this blog I’ll be posting our experiences and impressions of this congress on a day-to-day basis.
Day 1 – Technical Tutorial Day – Tue Feb 7th
| 1 |
Basic Design Concepts of IPv6 and the differences with IPv4 by Peter van de Velde – Cisco Belgium |
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This presentation discussed the various characteristics of IPv6 protocol also when compared to IPv4. This presentation was a ‘so-so’ start with information already widely known but it was a start nonetheless. The stop word of Gunter ‘as such’ at some point became a bit annoying after a while. |
| 2 |
Innovative IPv6 First Hop Security (FHS) and Technologies Regarding V4 to V6 Translation by Andrew Yourtchenko – Cisco Technical Leader |
| |
Interesting presentation focussing on L2 security including defining trust relationship with hosts and their nearest router(s) aka router authorization, securing link-operation, RA-Guard, SeND, Address Watch and Device tracking. Things that I learned was ‘address glean‘ to monitor address allocation and store bindings (to glean = to gather slowly and with extreme care, bit by bit). It was a boring presentation but with interesting topics. Andrew is a good an passionate speaker, but this subject is really something you need to dive into by looking into the slides, reading through the theory and eventuelly actually getting your hands dirty on it to really understand what the different technologies mean and how you could use it to its advantage. |
| 3 |
IPv6 and the BGP Routing Infrastructure by Susan Hares – Distinguished Engineer, Huawei Technologies |
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Surprisingly interesting presentation especially due to the many statistics on BGP routing explaining the nature of evalution and migration from IPv4 to IPv6. A topic I really need to understand better. Things I learned was the IPv4 Address report and its IPv6 equivalent. Susan also referred to Geoff Huston’s work in the IPv6 arena. Another thing I have never heard of was a bogon. Its definition on wikipedia is a bogus IP address. Susan is a scientist and clearly an experienced person in the BGP area. She calls herself a BGP geek. How true. |
| 4 |
Content Providers and ISP projects to enable IPv6 on their site or for their access networks by Jordi Palet Martinez – ConsulIntel |
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This presentation was the best presentation of the day from my point of view. It discussed the theory of migration versus coexistence and transition. IPv4 will still be around for the next decades and can not -by nature- simply be turned off nor deprecated. The terminology ‘migration’ is therefor not really describing the challange instead it is confusing. Jordi discussed the native IPv6 versus dual stack, tunneling and NAT approaches.
His conclusions were:
1. Dual stack as much as possible.
2. Tunneling, managed as much as possible via softwires or 6RD
3. Tunneling, unmanaged if no other way via technologies like Teredo or 6to4NAT
4. Translation & CGN like NAT64, DS-LITE, NAT444.
Next Jordi discussed his experiences in Spain at the Ministry of Industry, Tourism and Trade (MITYC) and at a Spanish publisher. Another interesting topic was his experiences with the IPv6 Awareness and Training Road show in Spain.
His conclusions were:
1. Do not design nor implement IPv6 as an IPv4 project.
2. Training and knowledge is essential
3. Planning is key
4. A V6 implementation might not be as expensive as you might think, as many old networks devices and servers already support IPv6 (if necessary after firmware or OS upgrade).
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While doing a performance test on one of our customer environments we observed the impact of TCP offload and “Receive Side Scaling” (RSS) settings on the interface card on Windows web servers in combination with traffic handling.
Setup:
1. 2x Mercury Load Runner generators hitting public URL of customer
2. Served by 3x Windows2003 SP2 servers, running IIS6
3. Load being balanced by Cisco CSS11503 to web farm.
The CPU performance graph of the web servers with TCP offload and RSS enabled on the internet facing (FRONT) interface:
Similarly but a more outdated graph even more clearly showing that traffic is alternating from one web server to another:
Most interesting right!?
What makes this traffic to alternate if the load balancer has been set up to distribute the load evenly across the farm resp each Load Runner vuser to clear its cookies and session cache after each request?
We then stumbled over this read, knowing that TCP offload to network card is a classic one , but still:
http://blogs.msdn.com/psssql/archive/2010/02/21/tcp-offloading-again.aspx
And found out the characteristic that when TCP offload and RSS were disabled, the load is more evenly spread across the web farm:
I find this pretty cool.
Any comments?
LISA is for sure is sort of event where every geek will find himself like home. It is really good feeling to be surrounded by people who know stuff and enjoy technology everyday.
So LISA09 took place between 1 and 6th of November, 2009 in lovely Baltimore, MD. I chose to follow more the tutorials (trainings) path. Got five tutorials – one bad, two medium and two nice ones. The problem with tutorials is that sometimes they are very basic which I really didn’t expect to be a case on such event.
Read more…
Already three weeks back from Lisa, and after some gentle stimulation trying to write down my experiences of this event. For the people who don’t know LISA, LISA is the Large Installation System Administration conference, a whole week of talks, trainings and workshops about various subjects all related to the work of unix admins in big IT environments.
From what I understood from people who had been here previously, the attendee list was a lot smaller than previous years. But still, there were more than enough people to share a talk with. It was good to have the opportunity to talk to people working at some big and very known companies like Yahoo, Pixar etc. But also I met some people who worked for less know companies (at least for me) but maybe even more interesting companies, for example, the national democratic institute. A non-profit organization facilitating democracy in countries where democracy isn’t that natural as in most western countries. I don’t think a lot of system admins have to worry about problems like militia stealing servers from your datacenter.
The first 5 days I followed a set of trainings, some days training for the whole day, some days a morning and an afternoon session. In general I was a bit disappointed by the trainings, they covered a lot of basic stuff, a whole day can be a very long sit for just 2 new bits of information. But a few sessions were quite interesting and/or entertaining.
Read more…
Every once in a while, I resort to one of the many “what’s my IP” type websites to lookup which external IP address I’m currently using. These sites have their uses for both professional, as well as personal purposes. Many of these sites provide a lot more information than I’m really after. In the end, I only want to see my current external IP address.
All the well intended, but known, technical and geo-location info presented by the numerous “what is my IP” sites tends to draw away attention from what you’re after and it doesn’t really play well with tools like ‘curl’ or ‘wget’.
There used to be a simple site I used, which just returned just your IP address located at http://www.whatismyip.org/, but this one also grew a lot of fat. Yesterday, I once again found myself looking for an external IP address, on a server with ‘curl’ and ‘wget’, and decided it was time I rolled what I was looking for myself. This turned into an extremely simple mod_python based scriptlet, which provides a no frills “What’s My IP” service, returning nothing more than a “text/plain” response with your current IP address.
This service is running on my recently upgraded employee rack server at Schuberg Philis at http://ip.yppy.eu/. For me it provided useful and I hope other people also find this ‘less is more’ service of use. And yes, I will keep it clutter free.
