Recently in Ipv6 Category

Leo Vegoda posted an interesting article today on CircleID about ipv6 deployment and adoption.

While Leo admits that measuring ipv6 isn't an exact science he was able to identify that the African region (AfriNIC) is announcing more ipv6 space than any of the other regions, including Europe.

So what about Ireland?

Sixxs maintain statistics of networks announcing IPv6 addresses globally on a per country basis.

The table for Ireland is quite interesting.

Of the 24 Irish networks with an IPv6 allocation, only 13 are active and of those only 10 are being announced globally (if my interpretation of the table is correct).

The Irish government has an allocation, but doesn't seem to have announced it ever!

Of course HEAnet is making use of theirs, but they're not a commercial ISP.

The problem for widespread adoption of IPv6 is going to lie in encouraging commercial ISPs to make IPv6 available.

When this is likely to happen, however, is anyone's guess.

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If your site is accessible over ipv6 or you simply want to find other ipv6 enabled sites then a new web directory called Sixy might be of interest.

Unlike a lot of more traditional directories Sixy uses tags to categorise sites and as a site owner you can specify which ones you'd like associated with your site. Of course if you have tags, then naturally you'll end up with a tag cloud, so you can easily see which tags are the most popular etc.

It's an interesting idea and if your site is available over ipv6 it might be worth your while getting listed now.

As I mentioned previously, I was asked to give a presentation on IPv6, or more specifically, our experience with deploying IPv6, at the recent ICANN meeting in Paris.

Leo Vegoda has posted an excellent followup of the session on the ICANN blog, summarising the speakers' various comments and thoughts.

While we may have some experience with ipv6 the session in Paris definitely opened my eyes to a whole set of issues that we will need to address moving forward.

Last week's ICANN meeting proved to be incredibly busy, both in terms of number of attendees and the number of announcements made.

From our point of view there were a number of topics that are relevant and important to our business and I'll be posting about some of these in the coming weeks both here and on my personal domain blog.

Last Thursday morning I was on the panel for a workshop on IPv6. There were four of us on the panel talking about our experiences from very different angles. If nothing else I definitely feel that I learnt something from it.

Of course the big announcement of the week was in relation to new Gtlds. Unfortunately a lot of people seem to have cherrypicked from the announcements and now seem to think that all sorts of crazy domain extensions will now be available. They won't. (I'll follow up on this over the next few days).

As John mentioned on his blog, ICANN have finally taken steps to mitigate "domain tasting". It won't stop it outright, but it should curtail it quite a bit. It will also have the handy side-effect of stopping Network Solutions' practice of "holding" domains for "clients", as they won't be able to do it without incurring a fee.

The Afilias team were at ICANN Paris in full force and held a drinks reception to celebrate the launch of dotme (Montenegro).

Closer to home (relatively speaking), Telnic announced their launch timeline. They've also started rolling out demo applications so that both users and developers can get a "feel" for the things you can do with a dottel domain (.tel).

The next few months should be an interesting time for the domain industry!

ICANN's 32nd International public meeting opened in Paris yesterday morning.

There are several hot topics on the agenda and judging by the crowds of people at last night's welcome cocktail, attendance levels are good.

If you're interested in finding out more head over to the meeting's official site where you can find details of meetings, talks, presentations and more.

The areas that are bound to attract attention this week are quite diverse and encompass topics such as new TLDs, the launch of .tel (dottel), Whois (again!), registry failover, the registrar agreement and both IDNs and IPv6. (Can you say "acronym hell"??)

Of course no ICANN meeting would be complete without an equally busy social agenda and last night's welcome cocktail at La Defense (photo above) was no different. Wednesday's gala dinner is being held in yet another famous Parisian landmark (more on that Thursday I hope!)

(ICANN meeting Lisbon, 2007)

I will be heading over to the ICANN meeting in Paris next week. At present ICANN holds international meetings three times a year and it's a very good opportunity to get involved with the discussions of policy and future development of the internet.

While I am looking forward to the trip, I'm also quite nervous, as I have been asked to give a presentation on IPv6 to a group of industry peers.

Here at Blacknight, as we keep telling people, we've been investing heavily in network equipment. In simple terms we've been doing our utmost to ensure that not only do you never have to suffer the pain of an outage, but also to make sure that any sites or servers hosted by us have excellent connectivity to the outside world.

One of the areas that is of concern to a lot of people in our industry is the depletion of ipv4 space.

(I can practically hear people yawning at this point!)

Basically any device, be that a pc, phone, tablet or whatever that wants to connect to the internet needs an IP address. Back when Vint Cerf et al were coming up with the internet they had no way of knowing how big it would grow or how their addressing system would be expected to cater for so many users for such a long time. The end result - the current system of allocating IP addresses means there is a finite number of them available and that number is getting smaller every single day.

Our CTO Paul posted about our plans to bring IPv6 to everyone last year.

Of course it hasn't happened yet, but we weren't expecting it to happen overnight.

As I mentioned in a recent interview with ENN, it's a bit of a "chicken and egg" situation.

With that in mind we've been working on rolling out ipv6 to as many areas as possible.

Some of our company sites are accessible over IPv6, such as www.blacknight.ie - but not www.blacknight.com, as we're waiting to upgrade some backend software to support the necessary DNS records. I'm a strong believer in "eating my own dog food", so I've enabled IPv6 on my personal servers so that you can now access several blogs and other sites over ipv6 or ipv4.

We're also in the process of enabling IPv6 on our nameservers, so that not only would we be able to server AAAA (ipv6) records, but the nameservers themselves will be accessible over IPv6.

Unfortunately not all hosting providers and ISPs are offering native IPv6 on their networks, so we have to do some jiggery pokery to get it all working on our partner networks (we run dns in three countries for extra redundancy)

It's interesting to see that the media has been giving some more coverage to IPv6 over the last couple of days.

I was interviewed by ENN yesterday afternoon for a piece they put out in the evening:

EC urges speedy adoption of IPv6

Basically the EU is beginning to take an interest so there may, finally, be some movement.

Of course the only way it's going to happen is if people are able to use it, so broadband providers need to be encouraged to roll it out.

If you want to play around with IPv6 you could start by asking your current ISP what their plans are.

ICANN released a handy document that covers the salient points last year:
IPv6 document