IPv4 Scar Tissue
June 24, 2011 By colin Leave a Comment
I recently read a few articles from around the the Internet regarding the debate surrounding the use of /64 or /126 prefixes on P2P links. Here is a response I left on another site: "The idea of using /126′s is little more than scar tissue from our experience with IPv4. It is the application of old ideas to new technologies and the argument that the addresses are being wasted is irrelevant. “We’re never going to use this many addresses” is a saying that is uttered with full knowledge that we said something similar 30 years ago (and we were so horribly wrong). We are afraid … [Read More...]
June 8th 2011 is World IPv6 Day – You Need to Play!
June 3, 2011 By colin Leave a Comment
June 8th, 2011 is World IPv6 Day! If you aren't already running IPv6 this is as good a time as any to get your systems set up to play on the IPv6 Internet. Head over to the official World IPv6 Day web site and get going. http://worldipv6day.org/ When you run their IPv6 connectivity test you want to look like this: … [Read More...]
A Life Without Network Address Translation (NAT)
June 2, 2011 By colin Leave a Comment
Network Address Translation - A Black Mark on IPv4's Name Why do people use Network Address Translation? Because they always have, that’s why. “That’s the way we’ve always done it” is one of the dumbest reasons we do things. It precludes continued thought and absolves us the responsibility to think about why we are doing something. Network Address Translation (NAT) has been a bellwether of the Internet world for so long that many of us can’t remember a time without it. Many in the business rally around its role as a mechanism of security in our networks, “hiding the … [Read More...]
IPv6 Means Never Again Having to Wonder…
May 29, 2011 By colin Leave a Comment
...about the IP address of your default router (default gateway in IPv4-speak). It's tough to argue against the fact that most IPv6 addresses are not much fun to type. Being four times longer than IPv4 addresses and expressed in hexadecimal means things can get ugly on the keyboard pretty quickly. For people in the IT field one very common mechanism for testing IP connectivity is to ping the default gateway. And in IPv4 networks, the default gateway is always different for every layer-3 network. It has now been a thousand bajillion times in my career when I have either asked someone … [Read More...]
In the World I See…
May 20, 2011 By colin Leave a Comment
I wrote this post several years ago. By writing it I was trying to get people to begin to think about how the size of the IPv6 address space, when combined with RFID technologies, was going to change everything about how they manage their lives. I wrote this way before NetFlix began streaming content, before Amazon's Kindle and before the iPad. When I recently re-read the post I laughed at how so much of what I wrote was already possible or being done in a completely new and innovative way (e.g. better than I had foreseen). The sum total of innovation made by forward-thinking … [Read More...]
The Debate Surrounding Section 6.5.4.1
May 20, 2011 By colin Leave a Comment
The IANA (Internet Assigned Number Authority) distributes IPv6 address to RIR's (Regional Internet Registry's) around the world. At the moment there are five RIR's and each of them is responsible for allocating IPv6 address space to ISP's (Internet Service Providers) and, in some cases, End-User organizations. Once a block of addresses is allocated to an ISP it becomes their responsibility to distribute the address space to their customer base. Let's assume that an ISP is allocated a /32 by ARIN. In the early days of IPv6 it was often said that everyone would be given a /48 by their … [Read More...]
On the Practical Feasibility of Ping Sweeping IPv6 Networks
May 9, 2011 By colin Leave a Comment
The IPv6 address space is huge. On paper each IPv6 subnet (/64) supports more than 18.4 quintillion hosts (millions, billions, trillions, quadrillions and then quintillions). It's an amazingly large number. By every conceivable measure today we can't contemplate a situation where anything but the tiniest portion of that address space will actually be utilized. Assuming you never have more than a few hundred nodes on each local segment (a common and best practice using today's technologies) the randomly generated addresses of your nodes are effectively hidden within the total number of … [Read More...]
Basic IPv6 Resolver Configuration in Ubuntu
May 4, 2011 By colin Leave a Comment
Most DNS servers these days are glad to resolve IPv6 addresses from clients who send the queries packaged in IPv4 packets. In the grand scheme of things the DNS servers don't care how you sent the question, they just care about the question. And because almost everybody still relies heavily upon IPv4, most of us who are trying to push toward IPv6 have been satisfied to get our AAAA resolutions using IPv4 as the transport. But if you want to start being more 'pure' in your IPv6 deployments you need to give your system the ability to not only send IPv6 packets out into the Internet, you … [Read More...]
The Sound of IPv6 Inevitability
May 3, 2011 By colin Leave a Comment
"You hear that? That is the sound of inevitability..." - Agent Smith, The Matrix. You will migrate to IPv6. It is happening. You will not be able to resist. The IANA gave out the last IPv4 allocations on 2/1/2011. There are no more. As I write, the RIR's will completely run out of IPv4 addresses within days. Not years, not months ...days. For years, corporate America has resisted IPv6. It has been a passive resistance. Something analogous to Ostriches with heads buried snugly in the sand. Many of us have heard the rhetoric surrounding IPv6. A few of us have … [Read More...]
Delivering DNS via IPv6 Router Advertisements
May 2, 2011 By colin 2 Comments
One very cool and highly promoted feature of IPv6 is stateless address autoconfiguration. If you don't already know, this feature enables a node to automatically derive its IPv6 address(es) without the help of of a DHCP server. That is a big departure from the world of IPv4. In IPv4 you either had to manually configure your IP addresses or you had to use DHCP. IPv6 has added address autoconfiguration as a third (and typically default) option. In the earlier days of IPv6 the promise of address autoconfiguration was marred by one unfortunate shortcoming; you still needed to have DHCP … [Read More...]
