Saturday, December 28, 2013

Practical IPv6 for Windows Administrators is available!

Practical IPv6 for Windows Administrators

My book Practical IPv6 for Windows Administrators from Apress is officially published and available to order. You can order a printed copy from Amazon, or a Kindle version and Barnes and Noble has the printed version available now too (a Nook version should be available shortly.)

A thank you to Richard Hicks and Jason Jones who did the technical review for the book. They were critical in so many ways and their feedback and honest opinions about things in the book were really valuable to me. The end result is much improved due to their hard work.

I also want to thank Jonathan Gennick my Lead Editor and Ana Panchoo my Coordinating Editor, both with Apress, for helping make the book writing process easy (as easy as you can make writing a book.) They really were fantastic to work with and considering this book was produced in 5 months they really had to work hard to make it all happen. If you are a technical author or want to become one I would recommend Apress. You can review through their materials on their Write For Us section of their website.

Finally, please don't be shy and let me know if the book was on target. I worked on trying to solve some of the design, operational and practical issues that come up with figuring out how to get started with IPv6 and Windows. There is always room for improvement so let me know!
- Ed

Wednesday, December 18, 2013

IPv6 is like global warming

I recently was on twitter going back and forth with some colleagues on the topic of IPv6 (shocking, I know) and I said the following:

"IPv6 is like global warming, sea level rise is easy to ignore (or deny) but it will impacts a crazy number of people"

This resonates with me. The fact that regardless of how you feel about global warming (man made, natural fluctuation, curse from a $deity) the effects are what matters. There is sea level rise (it is measurable, we are measuring it, it is going up) and given the fact that a very high percentage of the world populations live close or on the edges of the oceans they are going to be impacted.

There are practical ways to deal with this. Most agree the sea level change isn't going to jump up 3+ feet overnight (outside of storm surges, etc.) so it is possible to plan and take corrective action. There are cities and governments in the world where this is happening today. They are being proactive and realize it will take a long time to get everyone to adjust to this new change (building codes, zoning, etc.) There are also those that are not taking these actions. Finally there are those unfortunate few who can't address it even if they wanted to, like some small remote islands.

We won't know the final outcome and impact until years later. Who did the right strategic move and planned, implemented and were ready for the eventual sea level rise? It is analogous to those who plan, implement and deploy IPv6. In both situations you can wait. But eventually you must deal with the issue. Will you be ready when the sea level rise happens? Will you able to execute on IPv6 when your company needs you to?

So perhaps the global warming community can say:
"Global warming is like IPv6, IPv4 depletion is easy to ignore (or deny) but it will impact a crazy number of people"

How is that for turning it back around!
- Ed

Tuesday, December 10, 2013

IPv6 NAT66 and NPTv6 - it seems there is still a lot of confusion

I've written previous posts on NPTv6 but it seems I didn't do a particularly good job explaining the different between NPTv6 and NAT66 and there is still a lot of confusion understanding what the actual difference is between the two. While both are doing network translation they are doing it differently.

The difference is pretty simple. NAT66 performs the same function we have with NAT44. It is a stateful network address translation on a router or firewall. It will take an IPv6 address on one network interface and translate it to a new IPv6 address on the other network interface and forward the packet. It may perform some sort of application fix up to keep certain protocols and applications from having problems. It requires resources (CPU and memory) on the router or firewall to do this and the returning traffic will have to come through the same device because it is keeping a state table of all the translations it is performing.

NPTv6 is different then NAT66 in that only the leftmost prefix portions of the address are translated. This means that the device doing this translation do not need to keep state at all. So NPTv6 is stateless and therefore in theory can scale better and also be distributed across many devices doing the same function (regardless of forwarding changes and asymmetrical routing). The internal prefix and the external prefix sizes must match so if you want to use NPTv6 you need to do some work to make sure things match up. In other words, your internal network may have a /64 ULA prefix that you want to use NPTv6 to give it access to the IPv6 Internet. You will need a /64 of global unicast address space to allow the router or firewall to do the NPTv6 function with. If you have a /48 internally that you want to use NPTv6 with then you will require a /48 for that externally.

There are some minor variations of these two. NAT66 can, in theory also provide PAT functions allowing the overload of a single IPv6 address by multiple IPv6 addresses behind it. This really is not needed with IPv6 at all as there are more than enough IPv6 addresses to go around. In theory SLB64 looks like NAT66 because it is providing a shared VIP to access a resource and translating traffic appropriately.

As a general rule of thumb, those in the IPv6 community see NPTv6 as a potential tool to solve some corner case issues and they see NAT66 as not desirable. There really is no reason to run NAT66 and if you do require any sort of NAT function then you should be using NPTv6. Unless we want to repeat all the mistakes we have made with NAT44 over the years (and now NAT444 with CGN solutions) then adopting NAT66 is a poor choice.

Obviously this debate is ongoing and it could end up that NAT66 ends up winning but I am hopeful that won't be the case.
- Ed

Sunday, December 08, 2013

Follow up to my IPv6 and ULA post plus some thoughts on design and IPv6 behavior

I've gotten some interesting comments and questions in regards to my IPv6 ULA (Unique Local Address) post and I wanted to outline the questions and then follow up with my thoughts and some high level design discussion.

The first question is around the situation of multiple ISP connections without using BGP and Provider Independent (PI) addresses or alternately switching from one ISP to another. The argument is pretty straightforward, you don't want to have to renumber your servers, network links and other infrastructure when changing ISP's because the IPv6 address space you have is allocated from that ISP. That IPv6 address space will no longer be yours when you change from ISP A to ISP B. So, alternately you can use ULA for your network, server and even client devices and only use that ISP IPv6 address space at the edge, similar to how you implement IPv4 today. This requires the use of some sort of NAT translation at the edge.

The second question is a bit of a refinement of the above that argues you should use ULA for all internal hosts and your LAN and WAN resources so you don't have to renumber if you change ISP's but also so you have a consistent address prefix preference for internal traffic to register with DNS.

I think those really are the main pro ULA arguments I have heard so far. Let's tackle the first part which is really all about flexibility in choosing and changing your ISP and reducing the IPv6 renumbering costs to a fractional degree. The second one I will cover in a different post.

The following diagrams shows the multiple ISP connection configuration which is no different than migrating from one ISP to another. We start with ISP A on the left and will be moving to ISP B on the right. Our initial network configuration will use ISP A's IPv6 Provider Assigned (PA) address block and our goal is the move to ISP B's IPv6 Provider Assigned (PA) address block. For a duration of time you will have both ISP A's and ISP B's IPv6 address blocks active on your network. The next diagrams (Figure 2 and 3) are what everyone thinks they want to deploy. It utilizes some sort of NAT technology at the Internet edge and assumes you will only use ULA for the "internal" network.

Figure 1. Dual connections while migrating service providers

Figure 2. ISP 1 with NAT66

Figure 3. ISP 2 with NAT66

The primary problem with the ULA solution people want is that there are no good production quality NPTv6 implementations out there to run on a firewall or edge Internet device today. This limits your ability to actually deploy that solution so you are left with NAT66 (not a good option in my opinion). Furthermore, NPTv6 still breaks many end to end features for applications relying on the underlying networking protocol not doing NAT. Application developers will still have to build NAT traversal mechanisms into their apps even though we were not supposed to need them with IPv6 at all. The only advantage you will gain is that with NPTv6 you have a stateless solution for NAT as only the prefix is actually changed. This reduces the amount of resources required on that Internet edge device greatly compared to the same solution with IPv4. An additional option is to go with NAT66 (which is available from some network manufactures) but which make IPv6 even more brittle and introduces every one of the NAT/PAT problems we have with IPv4 only on a much larger scale. I consider this solution a huge mistake and using it roles back all the progress and design work that the architects of IPv6 put into the protocol.

The slightly more difficult dual ISP PA migration (Figure 1) solution will actually work just fine without ULA. You will have to do some planning to do renumbering however depending on your design this could potentially be relatively easy. The most difficult resources to renumber would be your LAN and WAN infrastructure and your servers. Client devices should be dynamically obtaining their IP addresses (IPv4 or IPv6) and should not care greatly if their network address prefix changes over a weekend or even within the day. IPv6 has no issue with running both PA IPv6 prefixes at the same time nor does it require ULA to do this function. You might gain some time back on larger LAN and WAN networks on not having to renumber and this could be true for servers also however you will have to write additional firewall rules and you will still have to give them global unicast addresses if they need to talk to the public IPv6 Internet at all (remember, limited or no NPTv6 support today). This means you still have to touch the device to change it over from one IPv6 prefix to another. If it does not have the requirement for being able to get to the public Internet at all then there is a use case for using ULA. I see this as a secure network and I argued in the previous blog post that a secure network would be a legitimate use case for ULA.

ULA may buy you a small amount of stability in avoiding some address renumbering but I would argue that a proper DDI solution solves almost all the issues using DDNS and name to IP address resolution. What you gain from ULA to avoid renumbering you will likely have to pay back 10 fold in NAT traversal issues and pain.

A quick question, how often are people changing ISP's for small to medium sized businesses? I think some of the renumbering argument assumes this happens far more often than it does. For many medium to larger enterprise customers they will likely get Provider Independent IPv6 address space and utilize BGP to advertise to multiple ISP's at once (Figure 4). They do not require NPTv6 and even if they need local Internet hop off at a branch location they would simply deploy both PI and PA IPv6 prefixes at that site and let RFC 6724 solve the source/destination matching (Figure 5). They can gain more granular control of the routing behavior if they modify the prefix policy tables.

Figure 4. Dual homed IPv6 BGP peering


Figure 5. IPv6 PI and PA with local Internet hop off

As for those that are dual homing but not running BGP they do not require ULA or a NAT solution, simply run both IPv6 PA address space on the network (Figure 1) and let RFC 6724 solve the source/destination matching. If you want more control you can manage the prefix policy tables on your hosts or do some routing policy work within your network. Even so, if you are doing dual homed but no BGP you likely don't have a large enough network to care or bother with those efforts. Either way, I believe it is still simpler to use both service providers IPv6 PA space than to deal with ULA and NAT.

Thoughts? What other ways to you see ULA being an advantage over global unicast IPv6 addresses in your network?
- Ed


My book is available for pre-order on Amazon or you can order directly from the publisher Apress