Call for IPv6 Papers

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Excerpt: I am working on an IPv6-related project, and though I think I have enough content to at least get started, I’d like to submit a request to the community at large. This project is aimed at providing additional awareness around IPv6 in general, but will be geared towards the entire networking community, ranging from those familiar with the protocol, to those that barely know what an 128-bit address is. This material will be publicly available and organized towards the goal of learning and becoming more aware of the new protocol. This resource will be very community-oriented and I thought, what better way…

IPv6 Next-Hop Best Practices

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Excerpt: The concept of a link-local address is new to some, seeing as the term is not widely talked about in IPv4 circles, despite the fact that some folks see them daily. In IPv4, the range 169.254.1.0 through 169.254.254.255 has been reserved for this purpose. You may see this in the “ipconfig” output of a windows host that failed to pull a DHCP address. In IPv6, fe80::/10 is reserved for this purpose, though link-local addresses are always configured with a fe80::/64 prefix. The concept of a link-local address is much more heavily used in IPv6, and one very popular use case is…

IPv6 Host Networking and Insomnia

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Excerpt: I’ve been running IPv6 on my home network for a while. The solution in place has evolved over time, from terminating tunnels to a linux VM using gogo6 all the way to front-ending with a Cisco ISR using Hurricane Electric, the goal has always been the same – to practice what I preach. Running IPv6 at home and *REFUSING* to turn it off when problems arise is one of the best ways to learn the protocol. So after one of the aforementioned evolutions (reconfigurations), I noticed that certain IPv6 web sites were not reachable, while others were. I did basic ping…

Assigning IPv6 Prefixes for Customers

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Excerpt: Now we arrive at the question of how much address space to allocate for…anyone. You may be a service provider, you may be a business, you may be a home user. Today, this question is quite easy to solve. If you’re a business-class customer, you ask your ISP for a block of addresses, and based off of your need (or ability to justify the need), you’ll be allocated some addresses. For many small-to-medium businesses, this can be as small as 8, or even 4 addresses. Let’s face it – in light of the current availability of globally routable IPv4 addresses,…

A /64 On Every Link? Are You Crazy?

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Excerpt: I’ve had some great conversations lately with a lot of folks on the topic of IPv6 prefix length in a variety of applications, specifically one very good discussion on just about anything IPv6 between me, the kind folks over at The Class-C Block and Tom Hollingworth (aka The Networking Nerd). For many folks that are considering the impact of going dual-stack in their environments, the idea of using a /64 on all links is still a point of contention. This becomes a religious debate when this argument is centered around point-to-point (2 host) links. After all – on paper, using a subnet length…

A Cloud Without IPv6

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Excerpt: As a Data Center junkie, I daily bear witness to the glorious transformations that are taking place all around me with respect to the “next-generation” of data center. Everyone who wants to move their DC to the next level are millions of dollars worth of DC networking gear that is EXTREMELY cutting edge, enabling virtualization and cloud to do things we only dreamed of being able to do mere years ago. We’re buying enough blade servers to fill hundreds or thousands of racks, counting in the hundreds of petabytes worth of memory, and enough CPU cores to fill a small…

The Failing Crusade Against NAT

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Excerpt: After watching the recent epic that was the comment thread on networkingnerd’s NAT66 blog post from last year, I was initially persuaded to sit and watch from afar. I’ve had the opportunity to work with IPv6 quite a bit, and though I’ve done a few IPv6-related posts on the site, I still feel like there’s always something missing. After all, much of IPv6 is still just talk (sadly) and not enough wide-spread adoption to really put it through it’s paces. The “network engineers” to whom the gods have gifted the great power of omniscience speak against IPv6 IN GENERAL on something as petty…