Monday, January 31, 2011

Jan 31, 2011 - IANA IPv4 delegation exhausted - up next the RIR's

For those keeping track of IANA's IPv4 /8 delegations to the Regional Internet Registries (RIR) the final blocks 2 /8's have been assigned, 39/8 and 106/8 went to APNIC. You can see the IANA IPv4 Address Space Registry for details of how things are delegated out not that it will help much but it is interesting to see some of the Legacy allocations.

So the next 5 /8's will be allocated automatically here shortly - guess IANA wanted to do that slower then all at once with the other 2 /8's going out to APNIC. So that is it - IPv4 address space is officially exhausted.


From a practical perspective not a lot will change until the RIR's start running out of address block. The rates will  vary for each RIR and Stephen Lagerholm has a great blog on the run rates and what the timing likely will be until they have no IPv4 addresses to hand out anymore.

So what will everyone do once that happens? Luckily the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything is 42... or is it 2^128?
- Ed

Pacific IT Professional San Francisco Meeting - Feb 1st

I will be hosting the PacITPros meeting in SF tomorrow at the Microsoft offices. On deck will be Citrix and AppSense going over how you can build some killer VDI solutions for iPad and lots of other platforms.

In addition, Microsoft will be presenting on their System Center product lines and some of the related products. Hopefully we can then get them back in to do a technical deep dive on a specific System Center product that the group finds most interesting.

Hope to see you there, as always the User Group meetings are free to attend. Please RSVP at the website so we know how much food to get.
- Ed

Monday, January 24, 2011

New CAv6TF website is finally up

I'm happy to say the new website for the California IPv6 Task Force is up and live. There are a couple of nice things about the site for those that are testing IPv6 connectivity. First, it displays the IP address you are connecting with - either IPv4 or IPv6, depending on which you used to connect to the site. Second, depending on if you connect with IPv6 or IPv4 you see a different image of the kame or turtle which is a tribute to The KAME Project which was started in 1998 and concluded in 2006. This was one of the early project supporting IPv6 and had one of the few early IPv6 websites I could actively test with back when I was doing beta testing of Windows Vista's IPv6 protocol support for the COSD team at Microsoft.

So next on the plate is the get the North American IPv6 Task Force website updated in the same fashion to make that available for general availability.

Friday, January 21, 2011

Howfunky.com - finally IPv6 enabled

I have been busy working on getting the California IPv6 Task Force website updated with the help of Jared Curtis and the new site has been launched, it is running on WordPress and should allow us some nice flexibility in pushing content out.

That got me thinking about my own blog. I've been talking and posting about IPv6 so much I forgot to do a simple thing - get my own blog up and running on IPv6. Well, as of Jan 20th, 2011 it is now IPv6 enabled.

As a sidebar, if you are using blogger to host your blog (as I am) and you want to enable your site for IPv6 then you should read this post. It goes over how to modify your DNS to enable IPv6 AAAA records for people to reach your blog site.

So there, it is official - the site is IPv6 ready!
- Ed

Monday, January 17, 2011

World IPv6 Day - June 8th, 2011 - Some thoughts

If you follow anything on IPv6 you likely noticed that several of the bigger Internet web companies like Google, Yahoo! and Facebook all announced support for World IPv6 Day via the Internet Society. The concept is pretty simple, these bigger web companies will enable IPv6 on their main websites - effectively adding a AAAA record for their primary web address.

Most of the current bigger players have IPv6 up and working already but are using an alternate name space to direct folks to a specific AAAA record. So, for instance, instead of http://www.google.com/ you go to http://ipv6.google.com/ - a minor thing for those in the know about IPv6. However, it makes it almost impossible to see the impact of publishing a super important fully qualified domain name space (like http://www.google.com) with a new AAAA record since only the people who already know about IPv6 and are likely technically savvy are using the alternate name space today.

So the challenge for the big boys who want to see what sort of impact publishing an AAAA record for their primary URL will be is the fact that losing any traffic impacts revenue. Because it is possible that an end user who is trying to get to Google and has a broken IPv6 connection will fail to see a webpage if Google has published a AAAA record. They might try a different search engine - say Yahoo! and if they do NOT have a AAAA record published the website will come up just fine on IPv4 assuming that is working for the end user. Lost revenue for Google. Executive types don't like that sort of thing... neither do shareholders.

So how do you solve this problem when you are a company like this? Effectively they have all gone in together and said let's all test the same day. That way if an end user is broken in regards to IPv6 connectivity they won't be able to get to Google but if they try Yahoo! the situation isn't any better. Neither company loses revenue to each other, they both might take a marginal hit but it is proportional and clearly acceptable if all parties are willing to be fair.

The interesting question is does this really impact end users at all? Is World IPv6 Day anything to really be excited about from an end user or even enterprise IT group perspective. Outside of being able to use the regular fully qualified domain name to reach a resource via IPv6 I would say no. Honestly, most organizations (actually almost all) do not fit in the category of having to worry how many millions of folks are reaching them and impacting their revenue day to day.

So, how can you best leverage IPv6 World Day? I would argue it would be a good day to already have IPv6 operationally running in your network, to have firewalls configured, routing working and end stations operational as a dual stack. If you have made it that far then IPv6 World Day means that those bigger web companies will actually get some meaningful data about IPv6, it's adoption rate and what they can do to better support it.

The end goal of all of this is to switch from "IPv6 World Day" to "IPv6 World" because the reality for the Internet is that the adoption has to happen and it needs to happen quickly. I don't have a problem with IPv6 World Day and I understand why the big web companies are doing it, I just think why wait? For everyone else there is little to nothing to lose but moving sooner rather than later. Chose the easier services like DNS and email to turn up on IPv6. Once that comfort level is there get the company website up on IPv6 too and you will be that much further ahead.
- Ed