OMB: IPv6 by June 2008

Thu Jul 7 21:43:06 UTC 2005

On Thu, Jul 07, 2005 at 02:55:08PM -0400, Scott McGrath wrote:
> 
> 
> On the training issue.  Everybody in our organization understands IPv4 at
> some basic level.  The senior staff here myself included are conversant
> with IPv6 but you have the level 1 and 2 people who for the most part are
> not even aware IPv6 exists and there are a LOT more of them then there are
> of us and these are the people who are going to get their world rocked and
> who will need extensive training to be effective in a IPv6 world.

May be my view is quite limited.  But just what exactly is soo hard about
IPv6 other than hexadecimal and /128 space?  Forget the NLA, TLA jazz, they
are all deprecated as of RFC3587.  CIDR at 128 bits and hex.. doesn't sound
too complicated to me for any average networker dealing with IP subnetting.

Most people who seem to have extensive trouble with IPv6 in my experience
happen to have trouble doing CIDR subnetting in IPv4 as well..  But for
average first-tier support, they just need to hear what IP6 addresses are
being involved, and using regular network troubleshooting tools like they
have been in IPv4.  I don't see much issue with this other than theoratical
nightmares thought due to the hexadecimal look.

With regards to your comment about multihoming, your concerns are certainly
valid and this goes back to the whole "The Great IPv6 Multihoming Debate."
Until it is resolved, some people are currently asking their upstreams to
pass their PA space to their peers just like the way it is in IPv4.  We
currently do this for couple of downstreams who are multihomed but unable
to justify for a /32 PI space at the time.  As long as you get two larger
v6 networks to pass along your PA space, you should be able to reach most
popular v6 contents using multihomed path.

I have a feeling, sooner or later, either scalable solution which can be
implemented will be introduced, or customers will simply ask their uplinks
to announce them or threaten to cancel service, just like in IPv4 world.

James

-- 
James Jun
Infrastructure and Technology Services
TowardEX Technologies
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james at towardex.com | www.towardex.com