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Engineer ipv6 ofcom

IPv6 usage in UK lagging behind our major global competitors

ipv6_usage_headerThis graph of  percentage IPv6 adoption by country as of today, 14th October 2013, was extracted from potaroo.net. It shows the percentage of internet users in each country using IPv6. You can get the exact numbers from potaroo. The UK’s 34th place suggests we are seriously lagging behind. OK we can look at it in terms of actual numbers of users – see the next chart below.  We are 13th one this one but take a look at the top 5 – all major competitors in the global commercial stakes.

v6users

 

These charts don’t show us how IPv6 adoption is moving with time for each country but I don’t get the feeling it is proceeding with any pace here in the UK.

Whilst we are on the subject of UK competiveness it is also worth noting that the annual Cisco Visual Networking Index is forecasting an average global broadband speed of 39Mbps by 2017. Ofcom reports that in May 2013 the UK average broadband speed was 14.7Mbps. This does fit with the Cisco forecast but to keep up with the game there is a lot of work to do to hit the 2017 number.

The base technology roadmap is there in the UK – you can now get FTTP on demand at 330Mbps. It’s going to take ultra high def TV delivery over broadband to drive the market. I think we are still relatively early days in this space. Fibre To The Premises with a performance of 1Gbps and up is still the end game.

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Engineer internet ipv6

IPv6 traffic hits 2% of traffic at Google

IPv6 came up in conversation over lunch this week. Google reports that up to 2% of traffic to its servers are IPv6. It took about 4 1/2 years for IPv6 to hit 1% which it did around February of this year and I guess another 7 months or so to then double (timeframes are imprecise because I’m interpreting a graph rather than looking at the numbers behind it).

Traffic to Google isn’t necessarily representative of what is going on generally on the internet and I’m not sure there is one single source of data on this subject. However you can look at specific internet exchanges to see the trend on their own networks.

DE-CIX in Germany is the world’s largest internet exchange (IX) and a peek at the statistics on their website show a growth trend. As of today, 29/9/12 the 2 day average IPv6 traffic at DE-CIX is at 6.7Gbps which compared with the overall traffic level of 1,430Gbps is still a relatively small proportion.

Anecdotally different ISPs are at different stages of the game with IPv6 with some having to look at Carrier Grade NAT as an interim solution. Equipment aside the main issue is often the fact that automated provisioning and back office systems need redesigning to make IPv6 a scalable proposition. Whilst IANA stocks of IPv6 ahem IPv4 addresses are exhausted this is not necessarily the case within individual ISPs which is perhaps why we aren’t hearing more scare stories in the media.

Check out this paper on IPv6 readiness written back in 2010.

Chart below is the Google IPv6 traffic growth – links to Google’s own page.

Google IPv6 traffic stats

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Engineer internet ipv6 ofcom

#WorldIPv6day marked with industry summit in UK

Just come out of committee room 19 at the House of Commons where a “summit” was held to discuss the state of IPv6 readiness of UK plc. The summit was chaired by Ed Vaizey, Internet minister and together with Timico had representatives of the other top network operators aka BT and Virgin. The mix was enhanced by Cisco, Nominet, Ofcom and other stakeholders.

Reality is that most ISPs have IPv6 covered, or at least a plan in place. The issue is that the rest of UK industry doesn’t. There has been extreme apathy in the corporate sector to push this technology forward.

This is completely understandable. Currently there is no problem. Considering this given a choice between spending money upgrading the corporate network or investing in a revenue generating service the former is a difficult sell for a CIO.

Businesses do need to guard against complacency though otherwise they might find themselves with a problem that will either cost a lot of money to fix quickly or take years of planning.

Neither is government prepared, as far as we can see. This compares with other parts of the world where governments are either mandating IPv6 (eg Malaysia) or are cracking ahead with full blown implementation projects (US Navy/NATO apparently).

In the UK it would appear that IPv6 is seen as a more expensive short term option for projects, at a time where cost control is clearly important. There was a general consensus amongst the 15 or so attendees that the Government should lead on this and that this would spur industry into action.

I agree with this. The cost argument is not a real one but the complacency is. Also we run the risk of other countries being ahead on the innovation curve as they think of ways of exploiting the huge number of IP addresses that now become available with IPv6.

There isn’t a desperate panic here but UK plc does need to get a wiggle on.

Check out the DCMS press release on the summit here http://www.culture.gov.uk/news/news_stories/8205.aspx

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Engineer internet ipv6

APNIC starts to ration IPv4 addresses #ipv6

The Asia Pacific Regional Registry APNIC has, as of today, begun to ration IPv4 addresses. Down to its last /8 block (around 16 million addresses) APNIC will now only be issuing  existing users with /22 blocks of 1,024 addresses and is urging its customers to accelerate their adoption of IPv6.

European registry, RIPE, is expected to be down to its last /8 sometime this summer. In the UK around 60% of LIRs (Local Internet Registry) have yet to even apply for their allocation of IPv6 – check out the stats here.

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Engineer internet ipv6

testing your endpoint for ipv6 readiness

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.

ipv6 test screenshot

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Engineer internet ipv6

The Day The Routers Died – official video #ipv6

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

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Engineer internet ipv6

The day we nearly lost the internet #ipv6

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.

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Engineer internet ipv6

bringonipv6 event London Transport Museum #ipv6

last /8 block handover by Leo Vegoda of IANA to Nigel Titley of RIPE NCC at bringonipv6.com

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.

Categories
Engineer internet

Bit Nibble Byte Chomp – a call to action

As we count the minutes down to the Move Over IPv4 Bring on IPv6 party tonight it seems appropriate to talk about nibbles.

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.

Chazwazza, Chunk, Column, Colonade, Colonnade, Doctet, Field, Hexadectet, Hit, Orone, Part, Provider number, customer number, network number, Quad nibble, qibble, quibble, Segment, Tuple, Word.

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.

That’s it. Time for a spot of lunch 🙂

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Engineer events ipv6

Final lineup for Bring on IPv6 party

click to register

I am pleased nay thrilled to announce the final line up for the Bring on IPv6 bash.

Opening remarks Trefor Davies CTO & co-founder Timico

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.

 

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Engineer events internet ipv6

Moveover IPv4 Bring on #IPv6 Party

click to register

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

What: Move Over IPv4 (Bring on IPv6)
Where: The London Transport Museum, Covent Garden
When: 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.

Many thanks need to go to the sponsors that have made this event possible. These are Nominet, LINX, Timico, ThinkBroadband, NewNet, AAISP, Brocade and 6UK.

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Engineer internet ipv6

Significant IPv4 announcement to be made in Miami tomorrow #IPv6

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.

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Engineer internet ipv6

Last 2 IPv4 blocks allocated – STOP PRESS

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.

Categories
internet

OMG the internet is about to run out of addresses what should I do?

IT manager worried about IPv4 to IPv6 migration

Media interest in IPv6 last week prompted a few questions, notably on twitter, regarding whether people should worry about the IPv4 address pool exhaustion. It would be easy to make noise and attract attention by saying “OMG yes – you should worry”. After all it is a fairly momentous event –> “The End of The Internet As We Know It”. ARMAGEDDON!!!

This blog does not indulge in such tabloid-like scaremongering 🙂  So what is the deal?

Well firstly it is very true that the IANA IPv4 address pool is about to run out. There are only seven /8 address block remaining and Asian  Regional Internet Registries (RIRs ) APNIC is about to ask for two of these. The growth of internet usage in Asia has been outpacing the rest of the world.

Word has it that APNIC has been holding back on this request to a) stretch the exhaustion date and b) give IANA a chance to organise the PR surrounding the release of the final blocks. Once APNIC has received its two blocks (each /8 contains approx 16 million IPv4 addresses) we will be down to the last five. This is expected to happen in January – or mid February at the latest.

The rule is that this is the point at which IPv4 exhaustion is declared and the remaining five blocks are distributed to the five RIRs. The last five should be released in March. (all dates subject to change in this rapidly changing world)

Of course whilst this means that IANA will no longer have any addresses each RIR will. It should, however, be remembered that /8 blocks are being used up at the rate of one every 6 weeks or so. It won’t be long before RIRs will run out of stock. It will then be down to individual ISPs to nurture their own stocks so that they last as long as possible. I have already heard (anecdotal) stories of companies being bought for their IPv4 addresses, at least in part.

ISPs can make their stocks last longer by getting better at recycling IPv4 addresses from customers who have left for pastures new. These ISPs will need to move to IPv6 or, in the medium term, depart the market because they will not be able to service new customers– enter tabloid press – ISPS HIT WALL AND GO OUT OF BUSINESS PANIC/STAMPEDE/WILL MINE BE ONE OF THEM? !!!

The industry has known this has been coming for a long time – more than 10 years so what’s the state of play?

The global network penetration of IPv6 is still quite low – only a few % – it does vary from country to country. This means that relatively few networks can talk to each other using IPv6. This rate of adoption is increasing as D-Day gets closer (Depletion Day?).

The migration strategy for IPv6 implementation is to run dual stack networks ie to run both IPv4 and IPv6 in parallel. Existing ISP customers will be able to continue to use their existing “IPv4 only” routers. IPv4 is not going away in a hurry. However you should know that once IPv4 has been “used up” new websites and services will start to appear that only use IPv6. If your ISP cannot provide IPv6 then it is quite probable that you will not be able to access services that only use IPv6. With time this will be a growing problem.

Consumers
As long as your ISP does support IPv6 then your routers don’t need to – the ISP can do a Network Address Translation on your behalf. After all end users don’t typically see their IP address. End users use the friendlier DNS system for sending emails and web browsing eg trefor.net sits at IP address 62.121.11.173 but you don’t need to know the underlying number – the system takes care of it for you.

Their problem will be if their ISP does not support IPv6 then they will not be able to help when trefor.net (or any other DNS based service) moves to IPv6.

Now consumers don’t need to rush out and buy a new router. For one if their ISP does not yet support IPv6 it would be a waste of money, but they do need to be sure in the medium term that the ISP has an IPv6 story. The other point to note is that routers don’t last for ever and do periodically get replaced as technology develops. For example in moving from 8Mbps to 24Mbps broadband many people will have had to have a new router.

One of the things holding back the release of IPv6 to consumers is the lack of support for the protocol amongst consumer broadband router vendors. The market leader for IPv6 equipment support is Cisco, whose kit is typically used in business environments. Cisco routers are too expensive for home users who expect to get the equipment bundled with their broadband connection for free or at least a very low price.

There are very few alternatives with fully working solutions – these vendors are only now just sampling their first devices to their ISP channel.

There is no real reason for this, other than a perceived lack of market demand, because ADSL routers typically all use the same open source (ie free) Linux kernel. Linux is the pet project of a global engineering community and provides good IPv6 support. We should therefore expect to see many IPv6 enabled broadband routers appearing in the market during the course of 2011 which will likely trigger more ISP IPv6 announcements.

Business
A business should give more thought to a plan to migrate its network from IPv4 to IPv6, or to provide support for a dual stack. This is because it might be a bit of a nuisance for consumers to have only partial access to the internet but this could be mission critical for a business, especially if it is that business’ own website and services, or those of its trading partners that become inaccessible.

Up until now this is something that has been completely ignored by the IT manager community but it is something that they should be aware of in 2011.

Support from Cisco and Linux is good news generally as many businesses are heavy users of both Note a business may not know it uses Linux but for example Timico installs IPv6-ready Fortigate firewalls – it is the firewall’s underlying Linux stack that facilitates this.

There is a lot of uncertainty here and I will be arranging some educational workshops to cover this in the near future – watch this space. In the meantime if you want to know more by all means drop me a line at tref at trefor.net.

If you want to learn more about what an ISP does to prepare for IPv6 read about our work at Timico in this previous post. Note since writing that post in December 2010 the number of IPv6 routes supported by Timico has grown from 3,500 to 4,500 which shows how quickly the space is moving.

Geoff Huston also has a good discussion on this subject here.

PS I will update the percentage penetration of IPv6 numbers as I come across them.

Categories
internet ipv6

The end of #IPv4 and the coming of #IPv6 – exclusive interview with The Young Journalist Academy

Over the past few days I have had a flurry of media interviews on the subject of the exhaustion of the IANA IPv4 address pool and the advent of IPv6. This is increasingly going to be a talking point during 2011. The biggest problem in linking to these interviews is that they are usually on the BBC and typically only accessible via iPlayer, and then only for a week after the event.

It would be nice to be able to link to something that should stay up for a more usable period of time. On this occasion I was pleased to spend some of Saturday morning (pre golf 🙂 ) talking to some budding young journalists in my hometown of Lincoln. They (Jonathan and Robert from Year 8, Carre’s Grammar School, Sleaford) have written a story and posted it on “The Young Journalist Academy” website.

The podcast is here.

Categories
Cloud Engineer internet ipv6

The Road to IPv6 (or How to Avoid the IPv4 Apocalypse)

Apocalypse IPv4

A paper by Trefor Davies and Chris Nicholls

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.

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Engineer internet ipv6

Top IPv6 websites – none of the big guys in it

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

Categories
Engineer internet

Is black market for IPv4 blocks imminent?

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.

Categories
Engineer internet ipv6

IPv6 on the Timico core

As the clock continues to tick on the IPv4 exhaustion counter I note that we have dropped down to 8% of addresses remaining.  I don’t know when this happened but I certainly get the feeling at as we approach the end it is speeding up – I was expecting it to slow down as people conserve address space.

Anyway I’m pleased to say we have now rolled out IPv6 across the Timico core network.  Not open for business yet but we are getting there and we do have a few trialists up and running.

Any bets on when the counter gets to 5%?

Categories
Engineer internet

IPv4 exhaustion date is Sept 5th 2011

I note that the number of available IPv4 addresses has dropped below the 10% mark. This is displayed on the counter on the right hand column of this blog but it took a link to the Number Resource Org on Facebook to alert me to the fact.

This year should see an intensification of efforts to move to the full support of IPv6. The Sept 5th 2011 date for exhaustion of the IPv4 pool is not very far away now. In reality there will still be stocks of addresses held “in private hands” so that date doesn’t see the unprepared fall off a cliff but it is a clear pressure point.

I should make it publicly known now that I’m planning a party for this date.  Anyone wanting to come along should get their name in early as I anticipate huge demand 🙂 .

Categories
dns Engineer internet ipv6

IPv6 DNS progress

IPv6 is on my mind and we have been busy in the background getting ready for the big day. You will have noticed the countdown timer on the bottom right of this blog. Time is marching on.

This last week we have been working on our IPv6 DNS capability. DNS is one of the first steps on the road to IPv6 deployment. It’s all very well having all your routers enabled but if noone can surf to a website, or send emails (to that fridge) then it’s no good is it?

For those of you that know these things:

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;cachev6.dns.as8607.net. IN AAAA

;; ANSWER SECTION:
cachev6.dns.as8607.net. 86400 IN AAAA 2001:40a0:5:53::10

PS if you really need to ask about the fridge then leave a comment or email me at tref at trefor dot net :-). Don’t be embarassed now.  I could just have easily have said light bulb 🙂

Categories
Engineer internet peering

LINX64

Timico is a member of LINX, or the London Internet Exchange. Linx is a not for profit  meeting point in London where ISPs and network operators meet to peer their traffic, ie to share their connectivity with one another.

It is a sign of the pace of growth in internet related activity that membership of LINX rose  in 2008 to 308, up by around 20% from the previous year. The peak traffic carried over the LINX network is over 400Gbps which is a lot of ADSL connections.

The LINX meetings are not only good networking opportunities but a great place to keep up with developments in internet technology. This week the subject matter includes at IPv6, DNS security and SPAM. LINX64 is sponsored by Telehouse.

I’ll post any useful material as it happens.

Categories
Engineer internet

IPv4 – the end is nigh?!

The IPv4 situation is already known to geeks everywhere. This is the protocol version that has been used by IP networks everywhere since the year dot (approximately). The number of IPv4 addresses the world can use is fixed because these addresses use 4 Bytes of data. The growth in IP networks everywhere is consuming IPv4 addresses at lightning speed.

This is not new news but we are now getting very close to where the addresses run out. Fear not. We will all move onto IPv6 which uses 16Bytes per address. Timico has an allocation of 158,456,325,028,528,675,187,087,900,672 IPv6 addresses for its customers’ use – so plenty of room for growth there.

The industry isn’t quite ready to make the move yet – certainly not in Europe and North America. However the time is rapidly coming where action will have to be taken. This link to potaroo.net has a neat illustration of how much time we have left – currently 788 days according to their site. 

Another interesting site is cidr-report.org which shows you the number of discrete networks that make up the internet. As the number of these networks grow an Internet Service Provider needs to add links into each new network as it comes online. Fortunately this happens automatically.

Finally another good read is the map of the internet from xkcd.com.  There is an element of needing to understand what you are looking at but even for  the layman it looks quite interesting (I think so anyway).

The end may well be nigh but don’t worry we are not doomed!