Lessons Learned from World IPv6 Day
Posted by Jesse Ward on Monday, June 13, 2011 · 
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World IPv6 day took place June 8, drawing media and industry attention to the need to migrate to the next-generation Internet standard.
The event was an attempt to encourage application providers, network vendors, ISPs, software makers and enterprises to test the new standard and start thinking about moving to it. It was organized by the Internet Society (ISOC) and more than 1,000 ISPs and websites participated in the one-day trial.
According to the ISOC, the test demonstrated that “major websites around the world are well-positioned for the move to a global IPv6-enabled Internet, enabling its continued exponential growth.” The ISOC said that the vast majority of users were able to access services as usual, but in rare cases, users experienced impaired access to participating websites during the trial.
The test did bring to a light a potential security issue. “A failure to properly accommodate the much longer address space in IPv6 by network vendors, security vendors, software makers are others can result in vulnerabilities such as buffer overflow flaws and those that enable denial of service attacks and address spoofing,” according to Noa Bar Yosef, senior security strategist with Imperva.
All ISPs and businesses with publicly available Web content should have an IPv6 transition plan in place. Stop-gap measures include translation, dual-stack or tunneling methods, whereby an IPv4 device can access IPv6 content and services. Security experts also warn that these transition methods may pose security risks for ISPs. Read more
It’s Official: IANA Distributes Last IPv4 Addresses
Posted by Jesse Ward on Monday, February 7, 2011 · ·
It’s official. Late last week the key groups involved in managing Internet protocol addresses announced that they have distributed the last remaining Internet protocol version 4 (IPv4) addresses, indicating the the need for companies to transition to Internet protocol version 6 (IPv6).
At a news conference last Thursday in Miami, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the Number Resources Organization (NRO), the Internet Architecture Board (IAB), and the Internet Society said they had made the final distribution of IPv4 numbers to regional registries, leaving the pool of such addresses completely emptied. The five regional registries each retained a block of 16 million addresses that could last a few months. Read more
Comcast Prepares for IPv6 Transition, Tests ‘Native Dual Stack’
Posted by Jesse Ward on Monday, January 31, 2011 · ·
Comcast announced today via a blog entry that it has testing a new IPv6 transition method. The cable company has successfully activated its first group of cable modem customers using IPv6 in a “Native Dual Stack” configuration. These customers have access to content and services natively over both IPv6 and IPv4, since they have both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses. Comcast notes that these are the first Native Dual Stack users activated in a production DOCSIS network in North America, and a key landmark in the service provider’s transition from the version 4 to the version 6 world.
IPv6 has been a hot topic of late. If you haven’t been following the news, the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority is predicting that it will run out of IPv4 addresses within the next few days. However, it will take several months before rural service providers and end users will feel the results – i.e. before they will be unable to obtain an IPv4 address for their Internet capable device.
All Internet service providers and businesses with publicly available Web content should have an IPv6 transition plan in place. Stop-gap measures include network address translation (NAT) or ‘tunneling’ methods whereby an IPv4 device can access IPv6 content and services.
For more on IPv6, read NTCA’s ePaper, and attend the 2011 IP Possibilities Conference & Expo where a panel of experts will discuss the IPv6 transition in depth.
ISPs Plan for IPv6 Transition
Posted by Jesse Ward on Wednesday, April 21, 2010 · ·
IPv6 is a hot topic on the minds of most network administrators. It’s the next-generation of IP, the standard which governs communication on the Internet.
IPv4 is currently widely used and accepted, but there are a finite amount of IPv4 public addresses, and we are quickly nearing the end of our pot of unreserved and unused addresses.
On January 19, 2010, the Number Resource Organization (NRO) announced that more than 90% of IPv4 addresses have been allocated. Most experts agree that the crop of IPv4 address will run out by 2012, if not before. Read more