June 6, 2014 archive
Jun 06
Happy World IPv6 Launchiversary! Two Years Of Remarkable IPv6 Growth (Featured Blog)
Happy Launchiversary! It's been two years since World IPv6 Launch in 2012, the day many major Internet Service Providers (ISPs), home networking equipment manufacturers, and web companies around the world started permanently enabling IPv6 for their products and services. In the last two years, participation and interest in IPv6 has only grown. Today nearly 250 network operators around the world are participating in World IPv6 Launch measurements, and we continue to see increased IPv6 deployment by network operators, websites, and home router vendors. More...
Jun 06
A Quick Ebook To Learn About IPv6: The Consumer Guide
Are you looking for a quick way to learn more about IPv6 and how to get started? Would you like to quickly set up a computer to test out IPv6 and learn how to use it?
If so, check out the Consumer Guide: All About IPv6. Published by the Internet Society Hong Kong Chapter, this ebook gives a basic introduction to IPv6, then provides tutorials for configuring IPv6 on consumer devices. It explains what IPv6 is all about by explaining IPv4 exhaustion and other benefits of IPv6 adoption. It also includes tutorials detailing how to enable and configure IPv6 and 6in4 tunneling on typical consumer software including Windows 7, Apple’s OS X, VPN clients, and home routers.
The book is a well-done basic introduction to IPv6 that is easy to read and understand. It is available both as a PDF that can be printed or read in an ebook reader or on a tablet or smartphone – or as a website for desktop viewing, complete with a clickable table of contents and other controls.
Thanks to the ISOC Hong Kong Chapter for creating such a useful guide!
If you are looking for more resources to get started with IPv6, please visit our “Start Here” pages that can guide you to resources appropriate to your type of organization or activity.
Jun 06
Dhcpy6d – A new tool to help with DHCPv6 (DHCP for IPv6)
We received the following guest post from Henri Wahl in the IT Department of the Leibniz-Institut für Festkörper- u.Werkstoffforschung (IFW) in Dresden, Germany.
Getting DHCPv6 to work
We run a network with approximately 1.000 client hosts. To use dualstack we decided to provide hosts with IPv6 addresses via DHCPv6. We wanted to use our existing MAC-based IPv4 address provisioning for IPv6 too and SLAAC gives not enough control regarding different classes of clients and dynamic DNS updates. Sadly we found no working solution, especially because RFC 3315 does not consider MAC addresses as useful. Thus we had to develop our own incarnation of a DHCPv6 server.
The result is dhcpy6d, available as open source at https://dhcpy6d.ifw-dresden.de and written in Python. It retrieves MAC addresses from local neighbor cache and this way allows us to keep our address management solution for IPv4 and IPv6.
Our DHCPv6 server allows to identify clients by MAC address, DUID or hostname. Clients can be organized in different classes. Addresses can be generated randomly, from MAC address, by range or by a given ID. Clients can get multiple addresses. Leases are stored in MySQL or SQLite databases. DNS information might be updated with ISC Bind9.
In practice we found Windows clients from Vista and up to be working perfectly as DHCPv6 clients. They even have no problems to receive multiple addresses per client. Linux and MacOSX desktop clients still fail on this.
Dhcpy6d still is work in progress but already works flawlessly on a daily basis. There are at least some universities which use it.
For details see https://dhcpy6d.ifw-dresden.de/documentation/ .
Jun 06
Great IPv6 Work Happening In Grenada In The Caribbean
Joining in to the celebration of World IPv6 Launchiversary, Brent McIntosh sent us some info about all the great IPv6 work they are doing on the island of Grenada in the Caribbean. You can view the PDF simply by clicking/tapping the image below:
Congratulations to Brent and all the others involved for the excellent IPv6 activity happening there!
Jun 06
Case Study: IPv6 At The U.S. Census Bureau
The United States Census Bureau is one of the leading implementors of IPv6 within the U.S. government. Charles Sun, IPv6 Transition Manager for the U.S. Census Bureau, provided us with information noting:
- On September 28, 2012, U. S. Census Bureau was the first agency – Operating Unit (OU) within U. S. Department of Commerce to be in full compliance of the U.S. OMB mandate for IPv6 transition Phase I (September 30, 2012);
- The U.S. Census Bureau is currently on track to complete the second phase of the U.S. OMB mandate to enable all internal agency users to be able to access Internet related services from our internal enterprise network by September 30, 2014 so as to be in full compliance with the U.S. OMB mandate based on the U.S. federal government initial IPv6 transition initiative.
Charles also pointed to two sources of IPv6 statistics:
- Estimated web statistics for census.govSee the “Links : Referenced Domain Web Statistics” section on the “Background and Methodology” page to fully understand what is being shown here. Essentially the first chart shows the speed at which connections can be made to the main www.census.gov site. The bottom chart shows the connectivity out to various sites that are linked from the main page.
- IPv6 statistics within the larger US Department of Commerce
Charles also wrote a personal opinion article on global IPv6 adoption titled “Stop using Internet Protocol Version 4!” that is available (with registration) at ComputerWorld, CIO.com and other related sites.
Please visit our IPv6 Case Studies page for more examples of IPv6 deployment. If you would like to get started with IPv6, please visit our IPv6 resources or begin with our “Start Here” page to help find resources most appropriate for your type of organization. If you have an IPv6 case study you think we should consider for inclusion on our site, please contact us – we are always looking for more!
Jun 06
Case Study: Facebook Moving To An IPv6-Only Internal Network
At the 2014 v6 World Congress in Paris, Facebook’s Paul Saab outlined how Facebook is well on the path toward moving to an IPv6-only internal network. He makes the point that why should you deal with the headache of maintaining a dual-stack (IPv4/IPv6)? Instead just move your internal network to be IPv6-only and then have dual-stack devices on the edge of the network to interact with the legacy IPv4 Internet. He also walks through the challenges Facebook faced with regard to vendor equipment, software applications and also with the issue that many developers continued to write IPv4-only code. (A clever solution: simply remove IPv4 from the developer’s machines!)
You can download a copy of the slides (and view commentary in the IPv6 Group on Facebook) to read all about the process, but here’s the key summary slide 31:
Those statistics are:
- 100% of hosts they care about respond on IPv6 (Hosts that are not IPv6 ready are going away.)
- 75% of internal traffic is now IPv6 with a goal to be at 100% by Q3 2014 or earlier
- 98% of traffic in and out of HHVM is IPv6
- 100% of our memcache traffic is IPv6
- A goal of being 100% IPv6-only in 2-3 years
Very impressive to see! All in all a great document for anyone seeking to understand the challenges that an online service may face when moving to IPv6 – and how to overcome those challenges!
Please visit our IPv6 Case Studies page for more examples of IPv6 deployment. If you would like to get started with IPv6, please visit our IPv6 resources or begin with our “Start Here” page to help find resources most appropriate for your type of organization. If you have an IPv6 case study you think we should consider for inclusion on our site, please contact us – we are always looking for more!
Jun 06
Facebook Moving To An IPv6-Only Internal Network
In a brilliant presentation by Facebook’s Paul Saab at the recent v6 World Congress in Paris, he outlined how Facebook is well on the path toward moving to an IPv6-only internal network. He makes the point that why should you deal with the headache of maintaining a dual-stack (IPv4/IPv6). Instead just move your internal network to be IPv6-only and then have dual-stack devices on the edge of the network to interact with the legacy IPv4 Internet. You can download a copy of the slides (and view commentary in the IPv6 Group on Facebook) to read all about the process, but here’s the key summary slide 31:
Those statistics are:
- 100% of hosts they care about respond on IPv6 (Hosts that are not IPv6 ready are going away.)
- 75% of internal traffic is now IPv6 with a goal to be at 100% by Q3 2014 or earlier
- 98% of traffic in and out of HHVM is IPv6
- 100% of our memcache traffic is IPv6
- A goal of being 100% IPv6-only in 2-3 years
Very impressive to see! Paul’s presentation is worth viewing because he outlines the challenges that Facebook faced from dealing with vendor equipment to getting developers to use IPv6. It’s a great case study that we’ve added to our IPv6 case studies page. We wrote about this presentation back in March, but it’s worth repeating today on World IPv6 Launchiversary #2.
Facebook very clearly understands the need to move to the production version of the Internet – and they are taking steps to ensure that their site and services will be available to the next 5 billion people who come online! They are going to be out in front of most other companies with having made the transition over to IPv6.
What are you waiting for? Visit our “Start Here” page or check out our IPv6 resources – and let us know if there is anything more we can do to help you!
Jun 06
Verizon Wireless Passes 50% IPv6 Deployment!
To all the doubters out there saying IPv6 ”will never happen”, on this World IPv6 Launchiversary let us just point you to the latest World IPv6 Launch measurements that show Verizon Wireless being the first of the top 10 largest networks to cross over the 50% IPv6 deployment mark!
Over 50% IPv6!
…as measured by Google, Facebook, Yahoo and Akamai. That’s a remarkable achievement – and if you look at the rest of the top 10 you’ll see that other networks are not far behind. As our colleague Mat Ford writes, IPv6 measurements are going “up and to the right”!
IPv6 deployment IS happening.
We are moving on from the “experimental” version of the Internet to the “production” version. The smart companies are already making the move. Where are you? If you haven’t already started deploying IPv6, now would be a really good time to start!
Congrats to the team at Verizon Wireless for all the IPv6 they have enabled with their LTE network – we are looking forward to seeing this percentage grow, and to seeing other networks join them in crossing this milestone!
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