IP4 Space

[owen at delong.com (Owen DeLong)]

On Mar 11, 2010, at 10:16 AM, Bill Bogstad wrote:

> On Wed, Mar 10, 2010 at 10:00 PM, Daniel Senie <dts at senie.com> wrote:
>> Well, it's like this... there's still no native IPv6 connectivity  
>> in most data centers, residences, >businesses or wireless, most  
>> vendors of networking equipment have not had a lot of mileage on  
>> >their IPv6 code if they even have it fully working, and, frankly,  
>> the IPv6 community has been >predicting a falling sky for so long  
>> that people just gave up listening. Add in a whole lot of other  
>> bits >of argument that just exasperate those dealing with today's  
>> problems, and it's pretty easy to >understand, if you've not been  
>> one of the ones pushing IPV6 for all these years, that there's a  
>> lot of >listener fatigue.
>
> I fall into this category, but I'm trying to get better.  This may be
> OT for this forum, but as someone whose network admin hat has mostly
> been at the LAN/MAN level, I'm less concerned about IPv6 peering, etc.
> then I am with what applications/servers don't play well with IPv6 and
> how do I work around those issues.  Where does one go to find out how
> organizations have switched their internal IT infrastructure to IPv6?
> Does it make sense/work to do this for internal operations even if our
> outside connections are IPv4 only (forget about tunneling).  Even more
> mundane questions like how to deal with IPv4 only networked printers
> when everything else is IPv6?
>
First, it's best not to approach this as switching to IPv6. Think of  
it, instead,
for now, as adding IPv6 capability to as much of your IPv4 environment
as possible.

I don't know of any applications which are negatively impacted by having
IPv6 capabilities.  Several end-user applications do not play well if  
you
remove their IPv4 capabilities, although that is getting fixed for the  
most
popular internet-oriented ones fairly quickly.

The most important things to get on dual stack initially all play well.
These would include your internet-facing services such as your
mail gateway, web servers, etc.

> If anyone in the Boston metro area wants to present to the local
> system administrators group
> (www.bblisa.org) on why we should care (and more importantly what to
> do) please contact me off list.   We're mostly a bunch of senior Unix
> system administrator who are comfortable in our IPv4 world
> and (I think) see IPv6 as a whole bunch of work to mostly get back to
> where we already are.  We've all heard about the coming address
> apocalypse, but it always seems somewhere in the distant future.
>
If you can get 50 people or more in the room, I'd be happy to come
present to your group.  Hurricane Electric will pay my travel.

Owen