Monday, December 27, 2010

End of year wrap up for IPv6

It's pretty clear that in the later part of 2010 IPv6 became a much talked about technical topic. What hasn't become clear is how many folks have followed up and implemented on it. As of this article post Hurricane Electric's IPv6 stats say 48 days of IPv4 space remaining with only 7 /8's remaining. However, since an automatic delegation happens when the number reaches 5 (1 /8 delegation goes out to each RIR) we really only have 2 /8's remaining for IANA to allocate out per RIR requests.

What is more interesting is that they have added a RIR stats showing how many /24's each RIR has and what percentage of their pool they are at. Notice that APNIC and ARIN are currently the lowest. There are several good blogs on who they thing will get the next 2 /8 delegations but it would not surprise me at all to see APNIC get one soon and for them to run out first too. Stephen Lagerholm has a blog that covers the topic in good depth and is definitely worth a read. What should scare you more are his stats and the fact that he has been scary close on most of the dates in the past. Also, his IPv6 stats show just how poorly the service providers, networking engineers and application folks are working together to get IPv6 adoption going.

I have been working on getting a new California IPv6 Task Force website put together. I will next be working on updating the North American IPv6 Task Force. There are now many sites with really good IPv6 information out there so the goal for the sites are to point to good resources and not to re-invent the wheel. The North American site will simply aggregate the content of all the other NA Task Force sites so someone can just watch that site to find out what is happening in North America. In addition, each regional task force will cover their respective area to tell you what is going on locally.

In case you don't know some of them:
California IPv6 Task Force - http://www.cav6tf.org/
Rocky Mountain IPv6 Task Force - http://www.rmv6tf.org/
Texas IPv6 Task Force - http://www.txv6tf.org/
Hawaii IPv6 Task Force - http://www.ipv6hawaii.org/
Mid-Atlantic IPv6 Task Force - http://www.midatlanticv6tf.org/
Canadian IPv6 Task Force - http://www.ipv6canada.ca/
Mexico IPv6 Task Force - http://www.mexico.ipv6-taskforce.org/eng/

Task Forces are in the works for the Northwest and Southeast but nothing formal has come out as of yet. Then there is also the global IPv6 Task Force - http://www.ipv6tf.org/

I hope everyone realizes that regardless of your business or residential status soon there will be both clients AND servers that will only have IPv6 available to them due to the lack of IPv4 address space. It won't happen overnight but it will happen VERY RAPIDLY. You have a choice, keep up and learn the next networking protocol that will allow everything to continue to function or fall behind and lose value and relevance. That said, there are some easy ways to start. First, check out http://www.tunnelbroker.net/ which is a free service from Hurricane Electric. It allows you to run a dedicated tunnel to your work or home and get IPv6 connectivity. You should also check out Freenet6 from gogo6. They have a nice windows client application that allows you to have IPv6 access via their free tunnel broker.

Prediction - 2011 will be the year of IPv6 - likely the year of panic about IPv6.
- Ed

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