Just a guy in Vermont trying to connect all the dots...
Dan York
Author's posts
Jun 19
Got IPv6? Can You Please Help With This IPv6 Deployment Survey?
Do you have IPv6 deployed within your network? If so, could you please take a moment to participate in the 3rd annual “IPv6 Deployment Monitoring Survey” on the current and future use of IPv6? The survey is at:
Sponsored by the Number Resource Organization (NRO), the coordinating body for the 5 Regional Internet Registries[1], the purpose of the survey is, in the NRO’s words:
to better understand where the community is moving, and what can be done to ensure the Internet community is ready and moving toward widespread adoption of IPv6. As it is mostly the same as the survey carried out globally in 2010 and 2011, comparison of progress will be possible.
We encourage all organisations to participate in this survey, which we hope will establish a comprehensive view of present IPv6 penetration and future plans for IPv6 deployment. The survey is composed of 23 questions and can be completed in about 15 minutes. For those without IPv6 allocations or assignments, or who have not yet deployed IPv6, the questions will be fewer in number.
The results will be publicly available, as last year’s results are, and if you can spare the few minutes to answer the survey it will greatly help the registries – and all of us – understand future trends for IPv6 deployment.
THE SURVEY DEADLINE IS JUNE 30, 2012, so please participate in the survey as soon as possible.
Thank you!
[1] The 5 Regional Internet Registries (RIRs) are: AfriNIC, APNIC, ARIN, LACNIC and RIPE NCC. The RIRs are responsible for managing IP address allocations (both IPv4 and IPv6) within their respective geographical regions.
Jun 19
How Well Will Microsoft Surface Tablets Work With Skype?
My own immediate question, though, was more mundane:
How well will these Surface tablets work with Skype?
Given that Skype is now part of Microsoft, and that Skype CEO Tony Bates has said the company is focusing on Windows 8, you'd hope it would work well. Throughout all the media frenzy, though, I've seen very little on that... until I scrolled down the "About" page and found this bit (along with the image I'm including in this post):
Surface has not just one, but two cameras. Use the front LifeCam to chat with the people that you care about. The rear-facing LifeCam is angled to 22 degrees so you can flip out the Kickstand and record meetings and events hands-free. Stereo speakers and dual microphones tuned for Skype help you sound like you are right next door.
No further details on that page, nor in their spec sheet, but I'd have to assume that at least the rear-facing camera is an HD camera. Perhaps the front one will be as well. The "dual microphones tuned for Skype" also sounds promising and could in particular help with situations such as that shown in the picture where you are having a group call. The dual microphones could help create a richer audio texture to the call in reflecting where people are in the room.
It's great to see Skype being highlighted in some way, as the tablet form factor lends itself quite well to Skype usage. I've used my iPad for any number of video calls while on the road.
As to "Surface"... we'll have to see. No pricing or availability announced yet, and that will determine a great amount of the traction we'll see for it. As much as I am a great fan of Apple products, and don't expect I'll use one of these Surface tablets anytime soon, it's very good for us as consumers and for the industry in general to see a tablet like this coming out of Microsoft. Competition is good and will only spur the continued evolution that continues to deliver easier and more useful products.
What do you think? Are you looking forward to trying a Surface tablet out? Do you expect Skype will "just work" on the Surface?
More info about Surface:
- Microsoft's news release
- Microsoft's Surface web site
- Techmeme's listing of sites covering the initial launch
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Jun 18
To Build The Interplanetary Internet, We Will Need IPv6
If we build an “interplanetary Internet,” how will we have enough addresses for all the network endpoints unless we move to IPv6?
Some of you are perhaps saying “Huh? An interplanetary Internet? Are you dreaming?” I’m not… because in truth we are already building an interplanetary Internet with the space exploration efforts we have underway, and Vint Cerf spoke at a TEDx event last year about further efforts and ideas. If you have 9 minutes to spare, his talk was a good one:
In particular I was struck by his commentary toward the end about essentially turning the cloud of orbiting devices around the earth into a giant listening sensor for inbound communication from distant ships or outposts. But as we create such a cloud, it’s going to potentially be quite large:
To make this work… and to make it work as seamlessly and easily as possible, it seems to me that we’re really going to want to use IPv6. Sure, it probably works fine initially with IPv4 with the limited number of devices… but as the number of devices increases, who really wants to be fooling around with subnetting or NAT with devices scattered all over the solar system? Far better, I would think, to use an addressing scheme that from the beginning can scale to this level as we continue to add more and more devices into space.
Now, to be clear, I have personally not been involved in any of the “Interplanetary Internet” discussions that have been going on for the last decade or so… but as I listened to that talk, all I could think of was extending the “Internet of Things” idea we use for terrestrial sensor networks out into space on a massive scale. And to me, that means IPv6.
What do you think? Will we need to use IPv6 as we expand out into space?
P.S. And for those interested in learning more about (or contributing to) work around building an interplanetary Internet, here are a couple of links to learn more:
Jun 15
IPv6 Friday: Tutorial on How To Set Up An IPv6 Tunnel From SIXXS
How easy is it to “IPv6-enable” your network using a tunnel from SIXXS? What are the steps you need to go through to do so?
Over on his “IPv6 Friday” site, Olle Johansson has a post up today about “Eating my own dog food: IPv6-enabling my training class room” where he walks through the steps involved with setting up a tunnel from SIXXS.net on an Ubuntu server. He goes on to explain how to then set up your local network to receive IPv6 addresses via router advertisements.
Kudos to Olle for continuing to publish great tutorials like this and I hope many of you will try this out as a way to get IPv6 connectivity into your current networks!
Jun 15
OpenDNSSEC Team Seeking User Feedback Via A Survey
Via Twitter we learned that the OpenDNSSEC team is asking for user feedback to help improve the software. If you are a current user of OpenDNSSEC, please help the them by filling out their short survey!
Jun 11
Why World IPv6 Launch Matters to Communicators / PR / Marketing
As a user of a browser, the answer is that right now you as a communicator probably don't have to worry all too much... odds are that your operating system and browser will all work just fine with IPv6 once you have IPv6 connectivity from your Internet Service Provider(ISP).
However, as a PUBLISHER of content (ex. websites, videos, images, audio, articles, etc.) out on to the Internet, communicators NEED to understand what is going on with the transition to IPv6 - and how you can enable your content to be available to people over IPv6. To put the reasons succinctly, they are:
- Speed - As areas of the world run out of IPv4 addresses, networks will be established with IPv6. Those networks will have "gateways" to content that is still on IPv4, but those gateways will inherently add latency / delays to people getting your content. If you want people to get to your content as quickly as possible (and to get to your content versus other content, since speed will increasingly count in search results), you'll want to make it available over both IPv4 and IPv6.
- Access to new/emerging markets - Best estimates are that around 2 billion people are currently on the Internet. That leaves 5 billion more who will be coming online in the months and years ahead. Odds are that a large number of those will wind up on IPv6 networks.
- Freedom / control - As IPv4 addresses continue to run out, some ISPs may put their entire networks behind a single public IPv4 address using something called "Carrier-Grade NAT (CGN)" or "Large Scale NAT (LSN)". The challenge for communicators is that these ISPs will then be in a position to be "gatekeepers" and either deny access to your content - or to charge customers, or YOU, for access to that content. Moving to IPv6 alone won't entirely prevent this from happening, but it will remove "IPv4 exhaustion" as an excuse for ISPs to do this.
- IPv6 is the "new normal" - The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) recently issued a statement that pretty much ensures that all new standards will require IPv6... and you can expect new tools and services to emerge that are based on IPv6. Sooner or later you're going to need to have your content available on IPv6... why not be a leader instead of a laggard?
As to the "HOW", we've put together an IPv6 guide for content providers over at the Internet Society Deploy360 Programme that walks through the steps you need to consider.
In my recent reports into the For Immediate Release podcast I have covered this in some detail. First, in FIR 653, I spoke about WHY it is important for communicators / PR / marketing to understand what is going on with IPv6:
And then in FIR 654 I spoke at more length about HOW communicators can IPv6-enable their content, essentially covering the steps in the Deploy360 guide for content providers:
The reality is that the Internet of the future will be based on IPv6 - you as a computer need to understand how you can make your content available over this newer Internet.
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Jun 11
Deploy360 Team Gathering This Week To Plan Site’s Future – How Can We Help You?
Today the Deploy360 team will be gathering for a week-long planning session to plot out in greater detail our activities for the remainder of 2012 and into 2013. Over the past 6 months, we’ve received a LOT of great feedback, both from this site and our social network accounts, as well as our ION conferences. We’ve got some exciting plans already and we’re looking forward to making it all happen!
To that end, we really want to hear from you! How can we help you deploy IPv6 and DNSSEC more easily? In particular, we’d love to hear your feedback on our content roadmaps:
as those are the documents we’re using to plan out future content curation and creation. We’re also going to be considering better ways to organize the site, additional content we can create and just in general better ways we can communicate with you all.
In a nice change for me personally, Richard and Megan are journeying up “he-ah” to Keene, New Hampshire, where I am based. Away from all offices (including my home office), we’re looking forward to some very focused time diving into what comes next!
Again… please do let us know how we can help you with IPv6 and DNSSEC!
Jun 08
Site Changes – And Returning To The Regular Mix of DNSSEC / IPv6 Postings
As you may have noticed, for the past three weeks our blog and our accounts on Twitter, Facebook and Google+ have all been pretty much “All IPv6, All The Time!” We joined with our colleagues to focus on what turned out to be the massively successful World IPv6 Launch and so we’ve been extremely focused on that event.
With IPv6 now launched, we’ll be turning our attention back to how we can enable more people to successfully deploy IPv6… and we’ll be bringing DNSSEC back into focus! So you can expect to see us returning to our usual mix of covering both IPv6 and DNSSEC on our blog and in our social media accounts.
While we have your attention, there’s two minor temporary changes to the site that we’ll note:
1. IPv6 Detector removed from front page – Ever since we’ve launched the site we’ve had this fun widget on the front page that showed whether you were connecting to the site using IPv4 or IPv6. Unfortunately, in the run up to World IPv6 Launch there was concern about how our web sites would withstand the expected load and so some caching technology was introduced into our infrastructure. Sadly, the caching servers interfere with that widget and so everyone was showing up connecting via IPv6 (don’t we wish!) and with an address of “::1″. So until we can sort out the issue we’ve removed the widget from the front page. Hopefully we’ll be able to get that back soon.
2. Facebook and Twitter signin for comments removed – We’ve been getting a lot of blog comment spam that was not being caught by the Akismet spam filter we’ve been using. After noticing that it was all coming from supposed Facebook logins, we removed the ability to login via Twitter or Facebook to leave a comment to see if that will reduce the comment spam (and it seems to have done so). So we need to figure out what’s going on there before we re-enable that capability. You can still leave comments… you just have to type in your name, email address, etc.
That’s the news for the moment. Thank you again for all the incredible feedback and support you’ve given us!
Jun 08
aaaa-check – a small little program to check for IPv6 DNS records (AAAA)
As I was helping out last week approving website participants for World IPv6 Launch, I found that sometimes I wanted to check for the existence of a AAAA record to know if the domain was already running IPv6. I was using the good old “dig” command for a while, but wanted an easier way to do it. I looked around for a tool that would do what I wanted… and when I couldn’t find one I dusted the cobwebs in my brain off of my python coding and wrote up a little app in python:
It also gave me an excuse to play with the dnspython library developed by Bob Halley (and also available on Github). Once you follow my installation instructions and make the file executable (or call it with “python” first), it just lets you enter in domain names and it will tell you if there is a quad-A or not:
$ ./aaaa-check.py Domain name = www.internetsociety.org 2001:41c8:20::29 Domain name = www.google.com 2607:f8b0:4002:802::1011 Domain name = www.facebook.com 2a03:2880:10:1f02:face:b00c::25 Domain name = www.wikipedia.org 2620:0:861:ed1a::1 Domain name = www.cnn.com No AAAA Domain name = www.youtube.com 2001:4860:800a::5b Domain name = www.yahoo.com 2001:4998:f00b:1fe::3001 Domain name = ^C Goodbye! $
I didn’t do anything fancy for commands… you just press Ctrl+C to exit.
What I was then doing was copying the domain name from the World IPv6 Launch web page and pasting it into the command window where I was running the app.
It worked well for what I needed… I probably won’t do too much more with it, although I might add on the capability for it to read a flat file from the command line, so you could just do “aaaa-python <filename>” and have it run through a list and tell you which domains have AAAA records.
Anyway… it’s out there and if any of you find it of interest please feel free to play with it. And if you feel like extending it in some way, feel free to send some patches (or if you are on Github, just fork it and then send me a pull request).
Jun 07
Why World IPv6 Launch Is Critical To Preserve The Open Internet
As I say in the video (below), my big fear is that IPv4 address exhaustion will create a situation where Internet Service Providers (ISPs) will use what is called "carrier-grade NAT (CGN)" or "large-scale NAT (LSN)" to put all their subscribers behind a single public IPv4 address.
The ISPs then become the gatekeepers. They can determine what you will view - or what you will pay to view certain types of content. They could also potentially restrict customer's access to the next great new service... the next Twitter or Facebook, for instance... until that service pays the ISP for access to customers.
It can completely flip the Internet around from one that thrives on "permission-less innovation" where anyone can create any service and make it available to all... to an Internet that is "permission-based" with gatekeepers controlling access at key points.
The migration to IPv6 does not, of course, remove the threat that the Internet very well could move toward a permission-based network... but the move to IPv6 removes IPv4 address exhaustion as an excuse to implement walled gardens.
To me, deploying IPv6 is a critical step to keeping the Internet open to innovation!
To learn more about IPv6 and how you can get started, check out the resources we are listing at the Internet Society Deploy360 Programme.
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