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

Monday, December 06, 2010

It is that Microsoft MVP renewal time of the year

I have several colleagues who are either up for a re-award for their Microsoft MVP award or others who are being considered for the award. I have to admit after all the years of being an award recipient myself I still find the process fascinating and a bit shrouded in mystery. Microsoft does the awards on a quarterly basis now to spread out the workload of reviewing people but the end of the year seems a good time to reflect on things especially since the award is given for the community work done in the "previous year."

My own experience has been really positive in terms of the nomination and re-award process and I think the Microsoft MVP leads (Shout out to Jake Grey who is my lead) do a remarkable job given the number of individuals they are doing checks on. Knowing the variation in participation and the breadth of technical topics the MVP community covers it is remarkable they can review though everyone.

I recently read a posting here by Eric Ligman and another posting here by Alessandro Teglia both on the MVP program, what it takes to become an MVP and a bit about the program also. The fact that the site list numbers like approximately 4,000 MVP's out of 100 million online community members seems to put my status in a staggeringly small category. It also means that a very small group of individuals (at least in Microsoft's opinion) influence a huge group of online and offline people.

It seems that some other companies have decided to model their community recognition after the Microsoft MVP program. For instance the VMware vExpert program seems almost a direct lift - I guess that is a great compliment to the work Microsoft has done and a validation that community really is important in a companies marketing and support relationships.

For those of you who are Microsoft MVP's I hope to see you at the Summit in Redmond. For those waiting to hear if you were re-awarded I have my fingers crossed for you and for those who are waiting to find out if they get to join the exclusive club, best of luck!
- Ed