Re: An Internet IPv6 Transition Plan

[Stephen Wilcox <steve.wilcox () packetrade com>]

On Wed, Jul 25, 2007 at 08:18:30AM -0400, John Curran wrote:
> At 1:15 PM +0100 7/25/07, Stephen Wilcox wrote:
> > > At present, there's a few years for these folks to switch to IPv6 for
> > > their growth.  It requires cooperation from the Internet, in that we
> > > all need to recognize that there will be IPv6 customers out there soon,
> > > and even if you don't plan on having those, please make your public
> > > facing servers IPv6 reachable in the next few years.
> >
> > I'm not sure there is time for v6 to be ready before companies find different ways to manage this. There are many 
> > things that need to happen to enable v6 and I dont think any of them are happening in a big way. Whether the large 
> > CDNs deploy v6, if v6 can be purchased in volume as transit are likely to be the major factors..
>
> Steve -
>  
>    Are you unable to make your public facing servers IPv6-reachable?

Well, I wear a few hats these days :) but.. I think the short answer is yes, I'm unable.

Most stuff I am involved in is modern enough that the servers have a v6 stack so that could be enabled. But the apps 
themselves are not all v6 so they would either need to be upgraded or fixed.

We would of course need to configure these and ensure all dependncies are v6 capable, particularly if we're sending 
address info back to customers we dont want to switch them in and out of v4/v6.

Then the network gear tends to be v6 enabled in the core and not at the edges where older gear has been redeployed. And 
a lot of the gear that claims to be v6 doesnt handle hardware switching properly so that needs investigating and would 
be an issue. Then we'd need to make sure all security and policies are uniform and working equally across v6.

Assuming we sort it tho then we need to bring up v6 transit, more v6 peers and drop any v4 tunnels as they cant be 
expected to handle production load.

I guess theres abstraction to fix too - my CMS, monitoring, allocation, much of which is automated and all of which 
relies on storing address info would all need to be rewritten to allow v6 addresses on hosts, interfaces, customers etc 

So fix all that and yes we could have v6 servers, but you also said reachable and according to my BGPv6 table theres 
very little reachable out there right now - about 700 prefixes when compared to 25000 v4 ASNs that should each be 
visible.


So you can break this into two elements - stuff I control and stuff I dont. For the stuff I control I think the summary 
is that I'd need to build an ISP from scratch essentially (if not in terms of capex purchases then certainly in terms 
of design and implementation). And the stuff I dont control, well.. I cant do much about that.

Steve