- IPv6 news and information

Last year, we presented statistics on the number of RIPE NCC members and the resources distributed to them. Now, one year later, we revisit the topic and look at how things evolved in 2010. We were particularly interested to see how the number of IPv6 allocations increased over time.

With unallocated IPv4 addresses nearing exhaustion, it is good to see the number of IPv6 allocations continued to grow exponentially in 2010 and early 2011. A total of 834 new allocations were made in 2010, compared to 554 in 2009. The graph below shows demand for IPv6 addresses was especially high during the last two months: 316 IPv6 allocations were made in January and February 2011 alone.

Another good sign is the growth in the number of LIRs holding an IPv6 allocation. The percentage of the RIPE NCC membership with one or more IPv6 allocations increased from 25% in 2009 to 35% in 2010.

For more information, please refer to the background article on RIPE Labs: Members and Number Resources, One Year Later

Written by Mirjam Kuehne

APNIC happened to be the first Regional Internet Registry to meet in the IANA post IPv4 era. While discussions and proposals on how to divvy up the last ‘slash 8′ into tinier blocks are to be expected, it was rather unreal to see the energy spent divining how the RIR’s would share IPv4 space that would eventually be returned to IANA and then regurgitated. A timewarp with the exhaustion clock turning backwards?

Captions like ‘Goodbye IPv4, Hello IPv6′ or with a touch of nostalgia like ‘Goodbye IPv4, we’ll miss you’ are more refreshing. Maybe a sign of thaw, IPv6 starts to percolate faster towards content, enterprise and end-users. VeriSign reports 205.3 million Domain Names at the end of 2010 and their readiness for IPv6 and DNSSEC. Major content providers and ISP’s are gearing up and the June 8th IPv6 day gathers momentum. The Paris World IPv6 Summit in February was a success and Informa also plans a World IPv6 Conference in London, UK, in June.

Lightreading reports that operators are looking to CPE suppliers for IPv6 help. They anticipate up to a 100 million IPv6 ready CPE boxes worldwide by the end of 2011 and all major CPE suppliers on board. The past twelve months have been interesting in this respect with D-Link taking a clear head start while mighty Linksys remained stuck in the starting gate. Their recent attempt at damage control with a rather hollow ‘prepared statement’ , when challenged on the IPv6 support issue (8), shows some nervousness. Some ears must be ringing and IPv6 support can be expected sometime in spring.

Another sign of a new season: IPv6 transition stimulates the demand for networking jobs — time to hone some IPv6 skills.

In april, ARIN will be the second RIR to have its first post IPv4 exhaustion meeting. Some furious chewing on the IPv4 cud is to be anticipated as the first RIR’s soon running out of undigested slices of IPv4. In the meantime IPv6 will continue to percolate into the capillaries of the internet. Considering that 25% of the French GDP growth in 2010 was internet related and that an additional 450,000 jobs depend on the internet in the next five years (see Internet accounts for 25% of French GDP growth), there is no doubt it will be oiled everywhere by a sufficient number of unique IP addresses.

Written by Yves Poppe, Director, Business Development IP Strategy at Tata Communications

Want to impress your fellow geeks?
Like to point out your ::/32 is way bigger than his /32?

Well, now you can!

As of today you can order nifty looking T-Shirts with cool IPv6 prints. In our webshop there is a selection of 14 T-Shirts with 7 unique designs.

Sweaters, Hoodies and other items can be requested until we add them to the shop.

For the moment there are only shirts for men, but if there are any woman who feel left behind just contact us and we will make sure that the shirts you like will be made available in a Women’s Girlie Shirt.

The printing and shipping is done via Spreadshirt which can deliver almost anywhere in the world.

On June 8 the websites listed here will offer their content over IPv6.

The goal of World IPv6 Day is to motivate organizations across the industry – Internet service providers, hardware makers, operating system vendors and web companies – to prepare their services for IPv6 to ensure a successful transition as IPv4 addresses run out.

The following websites have joined the (growing) list of company’s that will participate in the World IPv6 day:

Exact Abacus

WeatherCity Services

LCN

Server Choice

ISOMEDIA

Fortinet

Harvard University

Command Channel

Biglobe

YellowBot

cPanel has been working diligently to implement IPv6 support into our products since version 11.25. For cPanel & WHM, the back-end changes required to facilitate proper IPv6 management are nearly complete. We still have some work remaining with the services and graphical interfaces required to accommodate these changes, but we are exceptionally confident that most of these changes will be implemented before the end of the 2011 calendar year.

In the next few versions of cPanel & WHM, you may notice some changes in the interface as these back-end modifications become more visible in cPanel & WHM. Server administrators will begin seeing some IPv6 functionality appear in the graphical interfaces of version 11.32 and become more evident throughout future versions of cPanel & WHM. Our goal is to complete IPv6 support by version 11.36 of cPanel & WHM.

As some of you may already know, IPv6 is much more than just a change in the addressing scheme. However, given the urgency of supporting IPv6 addressing, we will first focus on allowing you to manage manually assigned IPv6 addresses at least as well as you can currently manage IPv4 addresses in cPanel & WHM. We also look forward to supporting IPv6 addresses on both NSD and BIND (for DNS functionality), Apache (for website functionality), cPanel & WHM and its related services, and the various mail services we support. Additional services will be made IPv6-capable as deemed fit.

Google has confirmed they are working on upgrading Google Webmaster Tools to support IPv6 Web sites.
Complete info at SERoundtable.