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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• Internet may run out of addresses by 2011, warns OECD
• The Internet is running out of addresses -- not
• European Commission targets 25% IPv6 availability by 2010

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

Journalists call from time to time asking me to talk about various internet related topics. Most of the time the publications or shows are "general interest", so you can only talk about very general things.

Last night, however, was quite different, as I was one of the guests on "Domain Masters" which is broadcast and streamed weekly at 7pm EST (11pm in Ireland, midnight CET)

The show's host last night was my good friend Jothan Frakes who is one of the domain name industry's gurus.

Although I was very nervous (which probably showed!) we had a nice chat about Blacknight, domains and the internet industry.

If anyone wants to hear the show there should be an mp3 version available on the WebmasterRadio site at some time over the next couple of days.

UPDATE: The Mp3 from last night is now available on the site http://www.webmasterradio.fm/Internet-Marketing/Domain-Masters/Geo-Domain-Expo-and-BlackKnight.htm

UPDATE 2: Of course if I provided proper hyperlinks people might be actually able to use them!
So here you go: Show details including podcast

When: Starting Wednesday 9th @ 22:00 and ending Thursday 10th @ 01:00

What: Migration of Dedicated, Colocation and IP transit customers
to new Juniper network layer.

In December we bought a bunch new of Juniper routers to upgrade
our core network with. The ones that were there, were almost 2 years
old and were due an upgrade.

We'll have the new Juniper router pair pre-configured with all prefixes
and BGP sessions. We'll slot it into place and clear the arp cache
on all affected layer 2 devices and shut down the old device. There will
be approx 10-30 minutes where routes to certain parts of our network
are unavailable.

This will also remove the need for our old IPv6 configuration. We'll now
have end to end native IPv6 core running on the Juniper platform. We're
the first hosting company in Ireland to build a native IPv4, IPv6 network
core on the Juniper platform and we're very proud of this fact.

Who will be affected:

Customers on our unfirewalled network (who have their own routers or
firewalls) or IP Transit customers.

This affects both customer groups in InterXion and DEG locations. If you
are unsure if this affects you or not, give us a call or drop an e-mail
into support@blacknight.com

Summary:

On Wednesday 9th starting @ 22:00 hours we'll be performing maintenance
on the routers that run our un-firewalled and IP Transit networks.

Ok not all of it, but the bit that we currently run. But we want to get as many
websites on our IPv6 platform before the end of 2008. This announcement/invitation is to all of our customers and potential customers.

Our plan:

1) To get 90% of our customer base onto IPv6 before the end of 2008.
2) We want to increase awareness of IPv6 in Ireland by advocating it and making every
single website we host for our customers available on the IPv6 Internet.
3) We want to take the lead in Ireland for IPv6 usage and set new standards for the
entire country and possibly the world.

So how are we going to do it? Good question and it's a simple one. We're going to start with the easier customers and then work our way upto the harder customers. So who, out of our customer base, is going to be easy to migrate?

The short answer, anyone that has their own dedicated or colocated server. Or to be more exact anyone running Apache 2.x on Linux. However we're not going to shy away from IIS 6 (despite it's rubbish support of IPv6). So there you have it, anyone with their own machine that runs linux or windows and has IIS 6+ or Apache 2.x or better can avail of this invitation.

Why?

1) Ok this is the difficult part. There are a lot of reasons, however it's going to come down to money eventually. All of our customers and indeed the global Internet community are used to getting IP addresses for free. What if, in 2010 you had to pay 100 euro a month for 1 IPv4 IP address?

Why the heck would I pay for 1 IP address?? Well your broadband line at home has 1 IP address, your SSL enabled website has 1 IP address and your Office has a /29 range from your ISP. That's 10 IP addresses total. Wow 1000 Euro per month. Now throw in your dedicated server into that bill. We give you 20 IP addresses for it and we have to charge 100 euro an IP address. That's another 2000 Euro. So we're upto 3000 Euro a month and all You get is a few IP addresses. _This_ could infact be the case in 2010 or 2011 if we don't hurry up and get dual-stacked and make IPv6 a reality.

2) There are many technical reasons for switching to IPv6 as well. The main ones that we're considering are very real world reasons. Why would an ISP in todays IPv4 Internet bother with IPv6? Why would they upgrade their kit, get a /32 from RIPE or ARIN or which ever RIR region they are in and go to the bother of learning how to deploy this seemingly cumbersome IP number scheme when there is no IPv6 enabled content on the Internet that their customer base (their bread and butter) can see/interact with.

People are not seeing the depletion of the IPv4 pool as a problem. It's been said for the last 3-4 years "In 4 years time we're going to run out and the Internet will die." While this isn't what'll happen, the problem is that we don't really know what will happen. Some people are saying there'll be an "IP aftermarket" similar to the "Domain aftermarket" where you can buy and sell IP resources for large sums of Money. This could potentially create a market where my exotic pricing scheme (outlined above) could exist.

To summarise, Blacknight as Ireland's fastest growing HSP (Hosting Service Provider) are going to lead the Irish Internet into the future by enabling 30k Irish websites to be reached over IPv6 by the end of 2008. Whether this is achievable or not is largely going to be down to our customers. If you have any interest in what we've said above please contact us via e-mail ipv6-wg@blacknight.ie . We want to enable all our customers to use IPv6, it won't be easy for everyone. Shoving your head into the sand waiting for this to all blow over isn't going to work either. One way or another, IPv6 is going to come into play. Live life on the edge, with us, deploy it with us ASAP.