Cupfighter.net

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:

1. Moving from IPv4 to IPv6 is inevitable. Not being part of it is basically ‘missing the boat’ and loosing the competitive advantage.
2. Be preprared before actually implementing IPv6. Have a sound strategy resp implementation plan.
3. Implementing IPv6 is a ‘journey‘. Take it on a step by step basis and learn as you go and grow.
4. Dispite that many (hw or sw) vendors say that they support IPv6 they do not always interop as you’d expect.
5. 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.
6. Expect to spend a lot of time on awareness and training. Knowledge on IPv6 is the critical success factor.
7. 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.
8. 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

In order to have the F5 BigIP LTM announce IPv6 Router Advertisements (RA) you have to logon to the console and create the following config file:

#
# /etc/radvd.conf
#
interface [interface name]
{
AdvSendAdvert on;
MinRtrAdvInterval 5;
MaxRtrAdvInterval 10;
AdvDefaultPreference low;
AdvHomeAgentFlag off;
prefix xxxx:xxxx:xxxx::/yy
{
AdvOnLink on;
AdvAutonomous on;
AdvRouterAddr off;
};
};

You have to use lower-case characters for the interface or vlan name otherwise this will not work!

Then stop the service: bigstart stop radvd
And start the service again: bigstart start radvd

Of course there was a warning, as all speakers must have done the last couple of years, about the `ending` of IPV4. We are running out of ip addresses, we’ve heard that before.

Here you will find a nice link of where Geoff Huston is predicting the end of time:http://www.potaroo.net/tools/ipv4/index.html 

And in fact, we cannot ignore this. It will happen. And I want to be prepared, so that’s why I attended this session. I cannot longer sit back and hoping this would only happen when I’m retired. (and the Dutch government is not helping as well, as they have decided to extend pensioning from 65 to 67 years..)

Windows has already implemented the IPV6 stack from 2003 (and XP sp2) onwards and IPV6 from Vista onwards is the preferred protocol by default. Of course you can disable this, but in Win2k8 IPV4 is built on the IPV6 stack, so even when you disable IPV6, you’re always able to ping your local-home-address (::1).

Something I found during my research: Exchange 2003 on Windows 2008 needs IPV6, unless you disable it via a reghack (http://msmvps.com/blogs/ehlo/archive/2008/06/12/1634433.aspx).

You need to understand the principles (doh…) but networking is a piece of cake with IPV6

IPV4 is all about routing, IPV6 is all about shouting, was a statement of Mark Minasi.

Motivators to use IPV6:

• China is knocking at the internet-door.
• All European car-manufacturers have agreed to implement IPV6 in their cars as the standart protocol for car applications. (so beware, breaking will done via commands transported via IPV6..)

I don’t want to get in detail here, plenty of explanation on the web, but the modern OS-es all are capable of doing IPV6, and certainly I will dive deeper into this.  

You should too.