I know relatively little about IPv6, but it has been in the air for years and with the IPv4 addresses fast running out surely now is the time it should be becoming the norm. All of my equipment is currently able to cope with either protocol - at least I think so. Yet to date it has not affected me at all. My ISP supplies me with an IPv4 address and I don’t know of anyone using IPv6. Big corporates internally maybe?
How is it envisaged that the changeover will happen? Can the two coexist seamlessly or will parts of the internet be invisible to those using one-or-other protocol? Is there going to be a big IPv4 switch-off analogous to analogue-to-digital TV or will IPv4 remain for many years to come?
IPv4 is going to remain with us for some time, despite the depletion of the address space. (And while NAT and other things have delayed the inevitable, the address space will be depleted. ARIN estimates they will run out of /8’s before the end of next year.)
In general, IPv6 will be rolled out by having parallel IPv4 and IPv6 network stacks running simultaneously on public-facing interfaces. So a network device will have both a 32-bit IPv4 address and a 128-bit IPv6. Those networks which are able to reach the device over IPv6 natively can do so; those that have to go over the IPv4 network will have to make do until they’re properly peered to IPv6 carriers.
The big problem will be last-mile installations. For example, the DOCSIS cable modem standard doesn’t even support IPv6 until version 3, and there’s tons of version 1 and 2 hardware out there. There are NAT-like protocols like NAT4to6 and NAT6to4 which can help in bridging private IPv4 networks to IPv6 and vice-versa.
There’s also the matter of getting your DNS records updated. Most places that have IPv6 connectivity won’t publish AAAA records on their main domain, because so many people have misconfigured IPv6 on their local networks; if you give out an AAAA record and your customer can’t find a route there, then your website appears down. So sites like Google and Facebook that are connected to IPv6 networks put their connectivity on a separate domain, until more peoples’ IPv6 configurations are sound.
In short, it’s going to be a fucking mess. Good time to study for a networking certification,
Yeah, as a network professional who spends a lot of time dealing with network professionals, I can honestly say that NOBODY I deal with has started migrating - and as far as I know, nobody is even running dual stacks.
Yes, all of the newer equipment is capable of dealing with it, but so far the only time I’ve seen it actually turned on is when nobody has remembered to turn it off…
There’s also a lot of waiting going on to find out how all the different ISP’s are going to handle the transition. They have a few options but these options have major consequences to how the different webservices will handle it.
To the best of my knowledge, the most common implementation of IPv6 is some government agencies. None of the customers I’ve gone to have actually started running IPv6, although a couple weeks ago a customer I was at brought up two new machines, and the admin forgot to disable IPv6 in W2k8. As a result, IPv6 addresses were registering in their DNS in parallel with IPv4, and it played havok with the application I was installing.
We have. But we develop software and are being driven by federal contract mandates. Once we implemented it for the development, qa, and support equipment almost all of the networking pieces were dual stack to support it. It was pretty easy at that point to complete the rest of the switches etc.
At this point everything new is getting dual stack. But there is no plan at all to turn off the IPv4 anytime soon.
Same here. IPV6 internally is no big deal for an ISV / ASP hosting company. We’re dual-stack everywhere behind our firewalls.
But, … As the first reply has it, we’re not pushing out public IPv6 addresses yet unless our customers demand them. Most are non-federal gov’t and their IT staffs are, shall we say, less than cutting edge talent with less than cutting edge equipment and budgets. Until they can prove they have IPv6 squared away at their public interfaces, we’re not advertising IPv6 publics.
But all the big ISPs and backbones can route the stuff just fine. And have been for some time.
