- IPv6 news and information

For me, one of the more interesting sessions at the recent IETF 81 meeting in July was the first meeting of the recently established Homenet Working Group.

What’s so interesting about networking the home?

Well, if you regard challenges as “interesting”, then just about everything is interesting when you look at networking in the home!

It’s been a very long time since the state-of-the-art in home Internet was plugging the serial port of the PC into the dialup modem. Even the ADSL modem, even when combined with some for of WiFi base station, is looking distinctly passé these days. Today the home network is seeing the intersection of a whole set of interests, including the phone service, the TV service, home security services, energy management, utility service metering, possibly other forms of home device monitoring, and, oh yes, connecting the laptops and the mobile devices to the net. And of course it’s not just a home LAN over a wired network. WiFi home networks are commonplace, and of course there are various Bluetooth devices. Maybe sometime soon it will be common for the home network to also host some form of 3G femtocell as well. But these days even that level of network complexity is not enough.

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The active measurements the RIPE NCC carried out on World IPv6 Day on 8 June 2011 included ICMP (Internet Control Message Protocol) and ICMP6 (ICMP for IPv6) measurements from our vantage points to selected hostnames of World IPv6 Day participants and other dual-stacked parties. We used these measurements to determine the performance of IPv4 versus IPv6 connections.

The figure below shows a histogram of all relative IPv4 versus IPv6 performance data points collected during World IPv6 Day. A single data point consists of the ratio of IPv4 and IPv6 performance from a single vantage point to a single destination during a 10-minute interval.

The image shows that while this distribution has a bell shape, it is a little “fatter” on the IPv4 side. This means that IPv4 is faster more often than IPv6. What this tells us is that you are slightly better off in an IPv4-only environment than in an IPv6-only environment. On a dual-stack client that unconditionally prefers IPv6 to IPv4, IPv4 is more often the faster protocol, but this is far from a universal truth. There is also a significant chance that IPv6 is faster, since the “IPv6-is-faster” part of the histogram also has a significant volume.

Note that we measured ICMP and ICMP6, and not HTTP performance. Also, the IPv4 and IPv6 end points for a given hostname may be topologically and/or geographically in (very) different places, especially when proxies are used for IPv6 to IPv4 translation. In cases where the IPv4 and IPv6 destination end points are not at the same location, the distance between a vantage point and either the IPv4 or IPv6 destination end point has a large influence on the measured performance.

In conclusion, we can say that comparable IPv4 and IPv6 performance can be seen as an indication of a mature deployment of both IPv4 and IPv6 in a network. In the data we analysed, we see that IPv4 is still generally faster then IPv6, but for a significant fraction of measurements IPv6 is the faster protocol.

For more detailed information, please refer to the background article on RIPE Labs: Measuring World IPv6 Day — Comparing IPv4 and IPv6 Performance.

Written by Mirjam Kuehne

Ziggo is enkele jaren geleden al gestart met het geschikt maken van haar netwerk voor IPv6. Uitgangspunt hierbij is dat Ziggo’s klanten nu en in de toekomst gewoon gebruik kunnen blijven maken van het Internet en helemaal niets merken van de omschakeling naar het nieuwe protocol. Naar verwachting ondersteunt Ziggo medio 2012 het IPv6 protocol voor haar klanten.

Bron: Ziggo.nl nieuws

Bill Cerveny of Arbor Networks has a great post on IPv6 Fragmentation. It works a bit differently in IPv6 from IPv4 and it’s a very important difference. This is especially true when considering how to implement a security policy. Fragmentation is one of the few uses of IPv6 extension headers seen regularly in the wild today and must use Path-MTU to work effectively.

Erion is pleased to announce that we are running several of our world-leading IPv6 training courses as public events in London UK during October 2011. These include our Implementing IPv6, Securing IPv6 and Introduction to IPv6 courses.

From the 4th to the 7th October we are running our flagship 4-day Implementing IPv6 course. Developed over 13 years, this course covers all aspects of IPv6 in comprehensive detail and is ideal for all technical staff wishing to learn more about IPv6. This course includes extensive practical hands-on exercises. We will be running the Linux, Cisco IOS and Windows versions of this course in parallel. You have the option to chose to carry out hands-on exercises on Linux, Cisco IOS or Windows.

From the 10th to the 12th October we are running our 3-day Securing IPv6 course. This course includes a detailed analysis of the security risks associated with the introduction and deployment of the IPv6 protocol and how you should secure your network for IPv6. This course also includes extensive hands-on practical exercises, where you are able to use a number of IPv6 vulnerability testing tools and implement a range of IPv6 security features.

On the 13th October we are running our 1-day Introduction to IPv6 which is a comprehensive technical overview of IPv6.

Erion is the world’s leading provider of IPv6 training. We have the largest portfolio of IPv6 training courses, suitable for all audiences, covering all aspects of IPv6 on all major operating systems and platforms. Erion’s courses are certfieid by the IPv6 Forum and are part of the Erion IPv6 Certified training programme. In addition to our public IPv6 training schedule, we also provide IPv6 training as on-site courses and we provide Erion Modular IPv6 Training which allows for a bespoke training programme to be created based on our hundreds of IPv6 training modules.For further information please contact us on +44 (0)1422 207000, [email protected] or through our web-site contact form.

Copyright Erion Ltd 2011, all rights reserved. Permission to publish this article unchanged is hereby given.

The mid-September Fall TXv6TF Summit agenda is starting to take shape. Today, TXv6TF announced that there will be a 3-hour hands on lab at the end of the 2nd day of the summit (September 15, 2011). This lab requires no prior experience with IPv6 and will be consist of the following agenda:

• Short lecture – IPv6 addressing
• Lab 1 – Configure network device with IPv6 SLAAC address
• Lab 2 – Configure network device with IPv6 static address
• Lab 3 – Configure network device for basic IPv6 routing between VLANs
• Lab 4 – Configure network device for OSPFv3

The lab will be lead by Jeff Carrell and is free, but advanced registration is required and seats are limited. Each participant must bring a laptop with any operating system that has VPN (PPTP) and telnet capability in order to participate in these labs.