IPv6 is very much in vogue at the moment. test-ipv6.com is a useful site you can visit that tells you how prepared you/your connection/your ISP are for IPv6.
I’ve run some tests on two connections for you to compare the results. One is IPv4 only and the other dual stack IPv4/IPv6. The difference is self explanatory.
The site itself will tell you that the most important test is the Dual Stack DNS. If this one fails or takes too long then you will have problems once people start rolling out IPv6 only sites. Clicking on each image will bring up a larger version. Both sets of tests come from Timico connections – the one on the left is dual stack and the other IPv4 only. Also click on the header of this posts if you want to see more of the successful test results.
This is the official video of the song “The Day The Routers Died” sung by Gary Feldman at Last week’s “Move over IPv4 Bring on IPv6” event in Covent Garden, London
Euphoric from the success of bringonipv6.com we hit the town in London last night. Adrian Kennard of AAISP had brought along his “internet in a box” as a laugh.
For those of you not in the know the TV programme “IT Crowd” have a box with a flashing LED light on top of it that they tell their manager is “the internet”.
So we went out to a pub with an identical copy of this box. Plonking it on the bar we asked the barmaid if she knew what it was. The completely unprompted response was “it’s the internet”. Result!!!
Of course this was a huge responsibility. Having just left a party to celebrate “the end of the internet as we know it” imagine the furore had we actually gone and “lost” the internet due to carelessness in a bar. Brings back memories of the FA Cup…
Thanks to Adrian for the photo – click to see more of it.
We have moved over IPv4 and brought on IPv6. Last night’s event at the London Transport Museum turned out to be a raging success.
300 or so people queued around the Piazza at Covent Garden to get in. Many more were watching the IPv6 twitter hashtag which had 1,235,715 impressions with exposure to 250,000 people. That’s a huge reach. Thanks to @lesanto for his most professional help here.
I’m not going to try and relive the whole evening in a blog post but I will be publishing videos of the event as soon as the film comes back from Boots the Chemist (only joking – but this high quality video takes a lot of rendering).
Photos are available here thanks to @Paul_Clarke. They are worth a look – this isn’t point and shoot stuff – it is art.
I’ll be thanking all the sponsors and speakers individually but you can see who they are on the event website.
I’m sorry for those of you who couldn’t get tickets or make it to this sold out event – you missed a cracker. More anon.
We will all be familiar with bits (0/1) and bytes (8 bits). You may even know that 4 bits is a nibble or a single Hexadecimal digit which makes a byte two Hexadecimal digits. IPv4 is a 32 bit addressing system with four time three lots of decimal characters.
Where is all this going do I hear you ask? This basic first year engineering degree primer!
Well tonight’s event is about IPv6, a 128 bit addressing system which has four blocks of four Hexadecimal characters. It looks like this 2001:1A20:1006:1001::/64.
Seeing as IPv6 is going to become commonplace there is now an ongoing discussion to come up with a name for those 16bit, 2 Byte, 4 x Hex character blocks. The currently proposed batch of names are presented below for your delectation.
These are all worthy proposals in an Internet Draft (click on the link to see the contributors names) which expires/due for next edit on 6th April. None of them stick with me though I do like Chazwazza because it is a cool name not because I think it works in this instance.
The Timico engineering team has started to use the word “chomp” to represent two bytes or the 4 Hex character block in IPv6.
Chomp is clearly in the mould of bit, nibble and byte and I would be grateful if you could chew this one over with a view to supporting the idea – we are submitting it as a suggestion when the above Draft expires.
Introductory speech Ed Vaizey MP, Minister for Communication, Culture and the Creative Industries
IPv4 retrospective UK internet pioneer Prof Peter Kirstein UCL
IPv6 scene setting Simon McCalla, IT Director, Nominet
IPv6 Panel Debate “Should industry worry about IPv6?”
Adrian Kennard, MD AAISP, Andy Davidson, VP EMEA Hurricane Electric, Jim Reid, Director, 6UK, Cisco Technical Staff Member
Ceremonials
Local handover of final IPv4 address block from IANA to RIPE – Leo Vegoda, IANA, Nigel Titley, Chairman RIPE NCC
Celebrity star guest – we are keeping the identity of this guest quiet but this will be a great finale.
Party time
Over 300 guests have signed up but thanks to the generosity of the sponsors we can still accommodate a few more. Drop me a line if you want to come and I will get your tickets sorted. Otherwise if you know the registration password you can do it yourselves at www.bringonipv6.com.
Cloud Equipment Market Will Grow From $110Bn in 2009 to $217Bn in 2014.
2009, according to a Cisco sponsored report by Forrester Research Inc, saw a significant uplift of sales of equipment into the cloud services sector despite the global recession. Figures show significantly greater growth in equipment sales that support next generation managed services as opposed to traditional Customer Premises Equipment.
2009 market growth
Their forecast for this market is that sales will grow from $110Bn in 2009 to $217Bn in 2014, a CAGR of 15%. It is all very exciting, I guess, unless that is you are stuck selling on premises equipment in which case you probably need to start thinking of career alternatives.
This information came from the Cisco Managed services seminar at the Tower of London last week. What struck me was the huge number of elements that make up the big cloud services picture. I counted 62 different technology areas that Cisco claim make up the whole market. These include areas such as Computing as a Service, Platform as a Service, Infrastructure as a Service and Software as a Service. The range is mind boggling.
This isn’t something that an ISP can undertake on a broad scale, at least not during the initial development stages of this market. You have to cherry pick your offerings.
Forrester have segmented the market into Unified Comms, Metro Ethernet, Security, Managed VPN (MPLS I assume) and Data Center . This may help. Timico plays in all these market segments to greater or lesser degrees which is somewhat reassuring.
In my mind you have to ignore the buzzwords and get on with satisfying what your customers need. In many cases customers will already have a good idea but there will be many more looking for guidance.
The case for Virtualization, which is a big part of the infrastructure play when it comes to talking about managed services and the cloud, is very strong.
I looked at one specific example of a company that had 217 machines/servers occupying 9 racks. On average each server has 500GB of storage (an assumption on my part but a reasonable one) but a memory utilisation of only 30 – 40%. That’s a usage of only 43TB out of a total available of 108TB (plenty of rounding here).
If this server estate could be distilled onto a robust Storage Area Network that represents a huge potential cost saving, just taking disk space into consideration. More memory is saved because these systems typically recognise which operating systems are being used by the Virtual Machines and do not replicate multiple instances of such software.
What’s more aggregated processing power = better individual VM performance. In other words the processor capacity available to any single machine is far greater than it previously had access to on a single server. This inevitably results in performance efficiencies. The bandwidth story is the same. An individual stand alone server is likely to be served by a maximum of 1Gbps whereas a VM will probably get 10Gbps.
The example I looked at will result in 217 VMs on single 8U blade centre with a capacity 32 servers though we won’t need all 32 for this specific customer.
As Cisco has suggested the market is undergoing a big change right now. One that requires significant investment in infrastructure. I suspect that many familiar names will fail to make it through. It will be interesting to see who emerges into the clear skies beyond the cloud 🙂
Charts are courtesy of Cisco with Data from Forrester Research Inc.
The Google transparency report should be of interest to readers. It shows Google traffic levels to/from a given country. If you click on the link it shows that traffic out of Libya ground to a halt on Thursday evening.
I am somewhat surprised it has taken the Gadaffi regime this long to kill the traffic – assuming that is what has happened.
The first tranche of tickets has all but sold out for this event. If when you register there are no more spaces don’t worry – just get your name on the waiting list. I’ve been able to secure additional sponsorship and expect to be able to increase the number of partygoers.
The demand for tickets has been amazing and I think reflects the fact that there is a lot of interest in both celebrating the exhaustion of the IANA IPv4 address pool (the end of the internet as we know it) and wanting to see what progress is being made re IPv6 implementation.
I am also pleased to say that we have a special star guest signed up for the event. I’m keeping his/her identity a secret for the moment but it will be worth the wait 🙂
I am just waiting for confirmation of one more panelist in the IPv6 debate before publishing the final lineup.
More anon. Click on the icon in the right hand column of this blog to go to the event website.
We are marking the end of the internet as we know it with a celebratory event on the evening of 22nd March at the Highly Prestigious London Transport Museum in Covent Garden.
This gig isn’t just to bury IPv4 though. It is also a serious look at where the world is at with the roll out of IPv6.
If you are a techie in the internet community, a tech journalist or just as importantly an IT manager/CTO/CIO who might want to understand the relevance of IPv4 exhaustion to your business then you need to be here.
We have a nice little retrospective look at the history of the Internet in the UK by early Pioneer and colleague of Vint Cerf, Prof Peter Kirstein.
Also on stage will be speakers discussing the actual state of IPv6 rollout, the practicalities of implementation and the problems yet to be overcome.
Then we will be peering into a crystal ball and taking a look at the future of the internet and the www!
Finally there will be a ceremonial bit of fun whereby IANA will do a re-run of the handover of the last block of IPv4 addresses to RIPE.
Bring your camera. You will want to remember this one
18.30 – 21.30 Tuesday March 22nd (ceremonials commence 19.00hrs)
Agenda:
A brief history of the internet and the www by internet pioneer Prof Peter Kirstein.
What next? Is the world ready for IPv6? What are the problems?
The future of the internet!
Ceremonial repeat of formal handing over of the last IPv4 blocks by IANA representative to RIPE representative.
Party Time!
Cost:
This is a free event but entry is by invitation only.
Registration (click here to go to the event site) for “bringonipv6” requires a password as attendance at the event is invitation only. The password is freely available from industry sources or will have already been mailed to you. If we have missed you out you can contact Trefor Davies at [email protected] with your details.
The words Hague cyber warfare Treaty appeared fleetingly in my twitter stream this morning.
This really intrigued me. It brought visions of uniformed generals sat around a table at the United Nations signing fancy bits of paper. Over their shoulders were clouds filled with botnet armies – millions of compromised computers waiting for the command to strike, glaring ferociously at their opposite numbers.
There is a wonderful wealth of information out there on cyber warfare and security. For example according to Lt. Gen. William T. Lord, the US Air Force chief information officer, cyberattackers have shifted their tactics from trying to breach firewalls to penetrating applications and said the service has serious application vulnerabilities. “We have over 19,000 (information technology) applications in the Air Force,” he said, noting that Electronic Systems Center’s IT Center of Excellence at Maxwell Air Force Base-Gunter Annex, Ala., examined about 200 of them. “All of them had over 50 vulnerabilities.”
The incredible pace of introduction of new technologies is a serious problem to the military which likes to take years to develop and test anything it buys. It used to be that the army would be first to get advanced technologies that would one day filter down to peaceful applications. These days it is the other way round. The army must presumably end up using applications that have had little or no security testing but are considered worth the risk (I’m not speaking from personal knowledge or experience here).
The United Nations has in fact been giving this some due consideration – it would be negligent of them not to, fair play. Last week the UN published a document updating its position re disarmament and cyber warfare was covered in pages 12 – 20 (out of 42).
In the document the UN discusses possible solutions:
The security of confidential as well as less significant information and networks
A. Security updates should be applied to all systems
B. A comprehensive disaster recovery planning should take place, which includes provisions
for extended outages.
The creation of an international treaty which includes:
A. A concrete definition of cyber warfare which is ratified by all signatories
B. A limitation on the usage of cyber weapons
The establishment of an annual international platform, in which experts in the computer and
cyber field from different countries may foster dialog with one another regarding the issue of
providing measures to regulate cyber warfare
Increased effort in raising awareness about the cyber warfare and the threats it poses for the
world in its entirety
Most of this, treaty apart, is obvious stuff and to be honest suggests that the UN doesn’t really know what to do about it. Does anyone? I would be hugely surprised if many government really signed up to it. After all why would a government (naming no names) want to deny itself the ability to attack Iran’s nuclear programme using bloodless electronic means?
In any case nobody would trust anyone else not to develop cyber warfare tools – it would be nigh on impossible to police. This is unfortunately in my view a battle war that is being fought but that nobody can win. I bet the proposed annual international conference would be a very interesting one to attend though maybe not as interesting as the meetings that they don’t tell us about.
Those of you who have been following the countdown to exhaustion of the IPv4 address space will want to tune in to a webcast coming out of Miami tomorrow at 9.30 EST (GMT+5hrs). It is an open secret that this will be the IANA handover of the last 5 /8 blocks of IPv4 addresses.
We in the UK will be marking this important milestone in the history of the internet at a date in March. Look out for an announcement very soon. In the meantime you will be able to watch the ICANN ceremonials and press conference here.
The last two available /8 blocks of IPv4 addresses have been allocated by IANA to APNIC. This takes the remaining total down to 5 which means the IPv4 address pool is effectively exhausted. The last 5 are spoken for. There are no more. That’s it :).
I’m holding off crying “history, history” until the remaining 5 are allocated. This was, I’m told, originally planned for a ceremonial handover at the ICANN meeting in San Fransisco in March but will now happen much sooner than that. Keep reading this blog for updates.
I’ve written plenty about this so if you need to understand more do a search for IPv6. It is worth noting that this isn’t the total exhaustion of all IPv4 addresses. That will happen in dribs and drabs as people use up those held by Regional Internet Registries (RIRs – expected to be streched out in ever decreasing block sizes) and then use up their own.
You need an IPv6 strategy. For a quick overview on how it might affect you read this.
The Problem
Regular readers of this blog will know that we, the world, are about to run out of the IPv4 addresses that are absolutely crucial to the running of the internet. This notionally apocalyptic event is almost certain to happen over the next three months, maybe even two.
The allocation of IP addresses is managed by an organisation called IANA (Internet Assigned Numbers Authority). IANA hands out these numbers in /8 blocks containing 16,777,216 addresses. Clearly you would have to be a big network provider to need 16 million IP addresses. Because of this IANA hands these large blocks to five regional registries that then manage the distribution of smaller blocks to their customers. In Europe the regional registry is called RIPE NCC.
Whilst I have myself been guilty of (playfully) scaremongering in respect of the exhaustion of the pool of Ipv4 addresses, it is only really IANA that is about to run out. RIPE will not run out for perhaps another year and even after that individual ISPs will have their own existing unused addresses to play with.
Notwithstanding this it behoves all ISPs and network operators to get their house in order with Ipv6 which is the long since identified answer to the problem. Ipv6, a 128 bit protocol supports 2128 (about 3.4×1038) addresses compared the 32 bit IPv4 which only provides 4,294,967,296 (232) . IPv6 is expected to serve us for a very long time.
Few ISPs in the UK have announced IPv6 support. As we approach the IANA Apocalypse I thought I would share with you the engineering work that we have been doing at Timico in respect of IPv6
Perspective Timico has been running IPv6 as part of our internal research and development activity for a number of years. The core of the network has been running dual stack IPv4 and IPv6 with external connectivity to the rest of the internet for most of this time. Attempts thus far to bring these services to our customers have been limited due to the lack of demand, vendor support and our core IPv4 operations taking precedence.
The title says it all. I’m travelling at the moment with only an iPad to create posts with but I note on the wire that the IANA address pool is down to 2%.
I will need to revise my exhaustion date but february is either looking good or too late. My main concern is that I need to get the Apocalypse IPv4 party organised but am unclear about the date.
This is an extract from Nominet CEO Lesley Cowley’s speech at last week’s Nominet 25th Birthday party. She very graciously sent be a copy at my request because it contained some really interesting snippets worth sharing – so here goes:
25 years ago, the first .uk domain names were registered by a few individual internet pioneers. There are some interesting facts about the early days of the UK Internet:
the first domains were not in the format we currently recognise – they were in reverse order with the uk on the left, not the right.
Also, for a brief spell, some of the first domains were registered directly at the second level – such as bl.uk, jet.uk & nls.uk
and, for another brief period, registrations could be made under .gb as well as .uk, before .gb was closed to new registrations. Threads about whether .uk should actually have been .gb continue to this day!
As things became consolidated uniformity crept in and the .uk domains as we now know them came into being.
I usually attend the quarterly meetings of the London Internet Exchange (LINX). At the risk of boring readers you do find some fascinating facts at these get togethers.
LINX has 383 members with 56 new applications in 2010. That’s huge growth. Members come from 50 countries – so despite having London in its name LINX is very much international in its orientation.
LINX has 304 10Gig ports and carries over 776Gbp/sec peak traffic – roughly the same amount of traffic as around 160,000 Standard Definition video streams or 40,000 High Def. Traffic is up 22% in the last three months!
LINX members can reach around 78% of all websites in the world through their London connections. Interestingly historically LINX traffic has been fairly smooth whereas an individual ISP will see spikes based on high profile events such as the Olympics and the Football World Cup. Now even LINX is starting to see the effect of these events. The Chilean mine rescue is one example. People watched it on TV at home and then carried on using the internet once they had arrived in the office.
At LINX71 datacentre operator Telecity have just told us that they are selling out colocation space as fast as they can build it. They currently have around 23MW in the UK with a further 21MW in build.
Mind bogglingly they say that Google has as much datacentre space in Liege in Belgium as does Telecity in the entire UK.
More interesting facts as the surface – you read them first on trefor.net
The internet is a continuously changing body of many thousands of networks small and large connected together, mostly for the greater good. The functionality provided by the internet is growing at a mind boggling rate. The London Internet Excange (LINX) as one of the world hubs where these thousands of networks meet to exchange traffic has just expanded its remit to include chutney peering.
Chutney peering is very similar to the peering of internet traffic. The photo in the header (courtesy of @thomasjelliott – click to see more) shows the worlds first ever chutney exchange at a LINX meeting. The two peers are Timico CTO Trefor Davies (left) and Entanet CTO Steve @routerfixer Lalonde.
Picturing the scene in centuries to come, when Internet archaeologists are able to sift through the zillions of trivial minutiae — including @tref on Twitter — to try and piece together evidence of the early life on the internet.
For the very few of you interested – the uberest of geeks – you can now view my twitter archive, created using tweetnest and stored on the growing more useful every day resource trefor.net.
I am somewhat gutted that the first 2k or so tweets are not listed – presumably a “feature” of twitter. That’s a part of my online life lost forever (I can hear a few uhuh!s already).
I can picture the scene in centuries to come. There will be internet archaeologists expert in sifting through the zillions of trivial minutiae to try and piece together evidence of the early life on the internet. Where are the lost tweets? they will say.
Someone will no doubt come across some DVDs (or floppy disks) and have to take them to the science museum to have them read. Who was @tref? Presumably the guy that started the pangalactic blogging revolution that is trefor.net. Bearded professors will hold conference sessions discussing the subject and one day one of them will rush into the room crying “I have just found out who discovered the Third Law“.
I dream. It is dark on a Thursday afternoon and nearly time to go home 🙂
PS the header photo is just something I dug out that seemed to be remotely technologically archaeological. It is a steam traction engine that I saw at the British Ploughing Championships held in Lincoln last month. The “Victorious” was made by William Foster & Co of Lincoln sometime after ww1. Quality.
Nice party at Somerset House last night to celebrate Nominet’s 25th birthday. The header picture is of Nominet Chairperson Baroness Rennie Fritchie and CEO Lesley Cowley cutting the birthday Birthday Cake. Sorry it is a bit dark. It’s my phone’s fault.
The Nominet story is an interesting one as it maps the short history of the internet and I will cover this in more depth at a later date. What did stand out for me though, amid the good fun and champagne, was the absolute national importance of Nominet as part of the UKs critical infrastructure. It isn’t exaggerating to say that the .uk suffix is vital to the UK economy.
Nominet is a not for profit organisation but does generate lots of cash which it appears to be able to spend sensibly. The Nominet Trust is one beneficiary as are online educational initiatives such as Knowthenet.org.uk. The usefulness of the latter is going to depend on how ubiquitous the brand becomes and the willingness of other sites to promote it. The site includes a threat test that helps teach you about the dangers out there for internet users.
The Nominet Trust is UK registered charity founded to provide support to organisations and projects working to increase access to the internet, online safety and education and is funded by the registrar.
The story of Next Generation Broadband Access into the Final Third has to be all about the Digital Village Pump. The phrase has a certain flow to it but this is not about water. This DVP is about bytes.
The concept is that you run a fibre into a village and it terminates into a secure “datacentre” owned and run by the local community. In the picture below the DVP is tucked away nicely at the back of a building in the centre of the village.
Digital Village Pump set in a modern day utilitarian “datacentre”
The DVP is air cooled with minimal ongoing maintenance and running costs.
How you get the fibre into the village in the first place is going to be different for each community.
There is very often an existing fibre run in an area – serving a school for example. It is not untypical for such runs to have multile strands of fibre, most of which are unused. This just needs identifying. It maybe a wireless feed.
How that community then distributes the connectivity is up to them. It isn’t necessarily feasible to expect people with no experience of data networks to do this themselves but the idea is that they engage a management company to look
Cyberwarfare has been in the news this week with the discussions around defence spending cuts. This is hugely topical and hugely important.
The debate of course hinges specifically around national defence. We don’t want the Trident missile system being hacked. Warfare doesn’t just extend to weapons though.
France is currently grinding to a halt due to their seasonal batch of strikes – oo lalaa, whose turn is it this time lads?!
The IPv4 address pool dropped to 4% remaining yesterday, or at least that’s when I noticed.
Nov 16 2009 10% – dropped through 400,000,000 mark
Jan 20th 9%
Feb 25th 8%
May 10th 7%
June 2nd 6%
August 5%
Oct 18th 4%
I’m still sticking to my February 24th 2011 date for exhaustion – that’s only 4 months away. The counter currently reads June 6th. Not much in it really.
If anyone is interested in buying a block of IPv4 addresses I have secured sole access rights for the following.
The London Internet Exchange (LINX) this morning announced three new members: Hutchinson 3G, Kenya Data Networks and onlive.com from the USA. The only surprise as far as Hutchinson goes is that they were not already a member.
The addition of two new international members does however serve to underline the importance of London as a peering point for the global internet community.
I am the widow of Major General Ndabeninge Ndabeninge of the Nigerian Army Internet Warfare Division. Before he mysteriously died of a particularly potent computer virus my honourable and most beloved husband was very active in AfriNIC, the African Internet Registry and was able to secure a /8 block of IPv4 addresses for the exclusive use of the Nigerian Armed Services.
Now that he is no longer with us the Nigerian military high command has decided to close down this branch of the service as part of cost cutting measures. The war against cybercrime here in Nigeria has cost the country dearly – people are no longer falling for the scams. Because of this the block of IPv4 addresses is now surplus to requirements.
I don’t know whether it’s because I’m getting old but the pace of life seems so frenetic these days. Today I read about a 700Mbps DSL prototype showcased in Hong Kong by Chinese networking vendor Huawei.
Huawei’s SuperMIMO technology uses four twisted pairs to achieve a downstream rate of 700Mbps at a distance of 400 metres. This means it would likely fit into a Fibre to the Cabinet (FTTC broadband) scenario. In the UK of course we are just rolling out “up to 40Mbps” FTTC and trialing 100Mbps Fibre to the Premises (FTTP).
I mentioned in my post re lobbying and the Digital Economy Act (DEAct) that he internet was a boring nuts and bolts game without the sexiness of the music industry.
Well coincidentally I have just taken delivery of some new kit – we are continually updating our network. The picture below tells it all. The box, known as a 7606 chassis, is what we plug in the routers and line cards that run our connections to the internet.
It might look boring but engineers can get really excited about these things – at least at what is going into the box. The 7606 chassis itself is just
Work done by Mike Leber of Timico peering partner Hurricane Electric suggests that of the Alexa top 1 million domains only 2136 of them are IPv6 ready – that is to say they are running native IPv6.
With less than a year to go ot IPv4 exhaustion this suggests there is still much to be done.
It is brought home when you compare the top 50 sites with the top 50 IPv6 enabled sites – none of the domains in the former is listed in the latter. Now this doesn’t come as much of a surprise – big sites need to tread carefully as they
There has recently been quite a bit of interest in the IPv4 exhaustion date. Understandable. It is coming up fast and sounds game changing. What perhaps isn’t obvious to the casual watcher of the Gadget Show or reader of newspaper technology sections is the underlying complexity that surrounds the approach to the end of this IPv4 world.
In reading this blog your ISP will have directed your http request across the internet from its own network to the Timico network and to the server hosting the website.
This server has a public facing IP address, part of a contiguous block that is advertised to the whole internet. The
Whilst I was on holiday the IPv4 Exhaustion counter ticked down another digit to 5% or 14 /8 blocks .
Nov 16 2009 10% – dropped through 400,000,000 mark
Jan 20th 9%
Feb 25th 8%
May 10th 7%
June 2nd 6%
August 5%
Currently we seem to be using a /8 block every three weeks. With 9 blocks left before we are down to the last 5 (at which point IANA will distribute these simultaneously to the 5 Regional Internet Registries) it looks like we have 27 weeks to go to IPv4 Exhaustion.
In my book this is February 2011 and not the June date reported by the Exhaustion Counter on this blog.
