Fix6 – IPv6 News and info

APNIC has historically allocated new addresses from IANA when their pool size has been about 2 x /8. Their pool recently got below that number so we can assume that we will see an allocation of 2 x /8 from IANA to APNIC soon.

All the RIR’s pool will be pretty well filled after this allocation. The sum of all the RIR’s and the various pool will be about 21.5 x /8. This is a historically high number. I don’t expect to see any allocations for a while until ARIN and APNIC would have to refill their pool in the November/December time frame.

After that I would expect RIPE and APNIC to allocate in February of 2011 and then finally AfriNIC snatching the last block from the IANA pool somewhere March/April of next year.

RIPE NCC announced that they still have some seats for the IPv6 training course that LIR members can attend.

The focus of the IPv6 training course is to raise awareness about IPv6 and the current best practices for deploying it. It also covers IPv6 Internet addressing policies and how to obtain IPv6 address space.

If you are registered as a LIR, and interested in their IPv6 training course, please register though the LIRPortal:

https://lirportal.ripe.net/lirportal/training/course-list.html

More information about the training:

http://www.ripe.net/training/ipv6/outline.html

Some good IPv6 news from Google

As of 18th of June (perhaps sooner) the Googlebot has been indexing websites via IPv6:

2001:4860:4801:1109:0:6006:1300:b075 – - [18/Jun/2010:08:46:05 +0200] “GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.1″ 200 69 “-” “Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)”
2001:4860:4801:1109:0:6006:1300:b075 – - [18/Jun/2010:09:47:01 +0200] “GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.1″ 200 69 “-” “Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)”
2001:4860:4801:1109:0:6006:1300:b075 – - [18/Jun/2010:10:48:06 +0200] “GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.1″ 200 69 “-” “Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)”

In the logs of Fix6 i can find these request from the 18th June up until the 19th of July.

The IP is from the Google IPv6 range and resolves to:

5.7.0.b.0.0.3.1.6.0.0.6.0.0.0.0.9.0.1.1.1.0.8.4.0.6.8.4.1.0.0.2.ip6.arpa domain name pointer crawl-2001-4860-4801-1109-0000-6006-1300-b075.googlebot.com.

And that reverse back the the IPv6 address. So its a Googlebot with only IPv6 connectivity!

This is some very good news! Keep up the good work Google!

Did you know Google has a Product Ideas for Google website? Perhaps we can raise some awareness how badly we like to have IPv6 support.

So please help out and vote for the following idea:

IPv6 support for Google Mail / Gmail

By offering public and private IPv6 addresses, Qwest (NYSE: Q) is cashing in on the emerging opportunity to help enterprise and government agencies make their respective transitions from IPv4 to IPv6 addressing.

Current Qwest iQ networking service customers will be able to leverage the new IPv6 capabilities, including built-in security and its “near-endless” supply of IP addresses. Customers can run IPv4 and/or IPv6 addresses via either a dual stack or native IPv6 modes.

Today we have a Q&A with Visual Online. Visual Online caught our attention when they released a press announcement in January 2010 stating that they have started with testing IPv6 on their ADSL connections. Time to ask them a few questions!

Visual Online is a company that started its business in Luxembourg in 1996, back in the old days of dial-up Internet access. Since then, it has followed all the evolutions Internet has experienced by adding several services to its portfolio. In 2000 it became a subsidiary of the government-owned Entreprise des Postes et Télécommunications in Luxembourg.
Today Visual Online is one of the most renowned Internet and Voice over IP service providers in Luxembourg with its own international redundant backbone and Colocation infrastructure, operating Tier Level 2 and Tier Level 4 Datacenters, and distributing it through its Colocation-Center platform.
Visual Online is also a Domain name registrar for most of TLDs through its Dns-Stock platform.
For more information on our services please visit our website.

When and how did IPv6 began to be a part of Visual Online
Our first experiments on IPv6 started right after the Task Force IPv6 Luxembourg Meeting that took place on November 8, 2002. In that meeting, the most important Internet players in Luxembourg were present. Soon after that, we received our first IPv6 allocation on October 27, 2003.
In the first years only internal testing were performed. Later, we started offering IPv6 DNS services over our DNS-Stock platform. In January 2010, after different tests, we started to provide native IPv6 (dual-stack) connections to our broadband customers, being the first ISP in Luxembourg for that kind of offering.

What is the current status of IPv6 at Visual Online?
- IPv6 DNS services
- Native DSL broadband connections (dual stack)
- Our dedicated server customers receive their IPv6 prefix for free, in addition to their standard IPv4 addressing

It is important to note that Visual Online is currently providing to most of its broadband customers with IPv6-ready CPEs such as the AVM Fritz!Box 7570 and AVM Fritz!Box 7270 models. All of these customers may turn in the near future to IPv6, so we make sure today that they are ready for that tomorrow.

In what way do you expect to see IPv6 growth in the next couple of years for Visual Online?
The market will decide at what speed IPv6 will adopted. If more devices or applications arrive that would like to take advantage of the multitude of IP addresses that IPv6 brings to each user, then the adoption will be faster. We can expect though that the big manufacturers will jump into the IPv6 bandwagon only when this will be widely adopted by the public.
Nevertheless, we feel that, as an ISP today, we have to be ready to answer to the IPv6 demand if required. We notice however that the IPv6 content is still very rare on the Internet which we think is a major problem for the IPv6 roll out.
The private users will probably wait until the last minute to switch to IPv6 perhaps until they will be pushed by their need for a new product, or by their ISP! For the professionals there is more concern for the IPv6 adoption and they will surely be the first to take advantage of IPv6 addressing.

Are there any things you would like to say about IPv6 in general?
IPv6 is the next generation of the Internet Protocol, and will dramatically expand the number of addresses available for web sites, as well as millions of mobile devices with Internet access. Soon many people will discover it on their everyday’s life. Who has never thought about a fridge connected to the net that can take online orders for you according to what is missing inside? IPv6 can bring a world in which every home appliance can perfectly use his own IP address! A world were IP addresses are not rare commodity anymore.

Francisco Malpica

We have been running the poll for some time now and its time for the results.

In total 457 people voted on the poll:

197 people voted that we should just do it. That means that in every area that you could imagine, IPv6 support has to become common good. We do see more and more IPv6 support in all kinds of software and hardware products but this is only the beginning. With only a couple of years until you can not get any IPv4 more company’s should be aware that they will have to support IPv6, and they best start now so their products will be (IPv6-) ready when needed.

Don’t forget to vote on the new poll:  Would you pay extra for IPv6 support in hardware/software?

Here is an explanation if you are curios why the predicted depletion date was moved to an earlier date all of the sudden. APNIC made some very large allocations yesterday.

• China Mobile allocated a quarter of the 223/8 netblock. This equals about 4 million addresses and the addresses were in the range 223.64.0.0 – 223.127.255.255.
• China Telecom allocated about 750 thousand addresses to the Shanxi province in the ranges 1.68.0.0 – 1.71.255.255 and 223.8.0.0 – 223.15.255.255. Additionally they allocated about half a million addresses to the MeiMengGu province in the range 1.180.0.0 – 1.183.255.255 a few days ago.
• NTTDoCoMo in Japan allocated the range 1.72.0.0 – 1.79.255.255 or about ½ million addresses.

Source: http://ipv4depletion.com

T-Mobile USA has launched an IPv6 web site -- http://ipv6.t-mobile.com/. Only the front page (including images and CSS) is reachable over IPv6; most of the links are broken or redirect to the IPv4-only site. Clearly, it's still a work-in-progress.

This appears to be a futher development in their IPv6 strategy announced at Google's IPv6 Implementors Conference few weeks ago. (Btw, the conference was quite good; hats off to Erik, Lorenzo, and the rest of the Google team.)

T-Mobile USA makes heavy use of NAT44 and bogon addresses. Going forward, this isn't sustainable. So they've decided that future cellular deployments will be IPv6-only, with NAT64 to access the "legacy" IPv4 Internet (slides | video). Yes, NAT is bad, but this approach is the least-bad of the alternatives. There's still only one layer of NAT, it gets IPv6 on a large number of end nodes, and IPv6-enabled content (Google, Netflix, Facebook, etc) isn't NAT'ed at all. Over time, less traffic should flow through the NAT64 boxes as more content is IPv6-enabled. T-Mobile USA suspects they can run 50% of their cellular data traffic over IPv6 by the end of 2011 (apparently they send a lot of traffic to Google and Facebook).

On a personal note, it was very entertaining to hear Cameron Byrne from T-Mobile USA repeatedly tell content providers, "Our users are going to access your content over IPv6. The only relevant question is 'will we make the AAAA record or will you?' Wouldn't you rather be the one to do it so you have control?" After the fourth or fifth time it sunk in: These folks are serious.

This is an even gutsier move than Verizon. VZ is dual-stacking their LTE network and mandating IPv6 support on all devices. Let's hope T-Mobile is really good at running large-scale NATs.

Source:  http://www.personal.psu.edu/dvm105/blogs/ipv6/2010/06/t-mobile-is-pushing-ipv6-hard.html