IPv6 in Education Question

Bill Stewart nonobvious at gmail.com
Thu Mar 18 18:16:09 UTC 2010


You're either going to have to sell them on future-proofing or
"We're sailing off the edge of the world in two years,
there be dragons there, train your folks now."

Remember that there are two IPv6 transitions
- introducing IPv6 and forcing some people onto it
- getting rid of IPv4 after IPv6 support is universal.

> Death of NAT
NAT's not going away for a long time - IPv6 doesn't need it for
address space conservation,
and pretends not to need it very much for renumbering IPv6 to IPv6,
but it's widely used as a firewall substitute and administrative convenience.

The first IPv6 transition will eliminate some NAT in pure-v6 environments,
so there will be applications that are no longer broken and can Just Work,
but it'll also introduce several different flavors of IPv4-to-IPv6
NATs/tunnels/etc.,
so there are other applications that will get broken in new and creative ways.
The second IPv6 transition may really finish eliminating NAT,
but that won't be for *years*, and you'll need to get all your users
deeply involved in IPv6 long before that.

Other than networking research and networking-related training,
there really aren't education-specific applications of IPv6;
there are just sites that you can or can't reach with IPv4 or IPv6.
Any big commercial sites will stay reachable with IPv4 for a long time,
certainly until IPv6 has been well established for a couple of years,
and while there may be new content that's IPv6 only after a while,
commercial content sites are more likely to buy IPv4 space if they need it.
And most educational sites big enough to be Really Cool
already have enough IPv4 space to last a few years, though they
may very well start adding IPv6 connectivity just like commercial sites will.





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             Thanks;     Bill

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