

6UK powerless to encourage IPv6 adoption. Board resigns. - teh_klev
http://www.6uk.org.uk/2012/12/6uk-powerless-to-encourage-ipv6-adoption-board-resigns/

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ghshephard
My company has been using IPv6 extensively since 2004, and we have about 13
million network elements under management, and all of our internal hosts /
routers are 100% IPv6 addressed.

But, I don't feel any pressure, or see any need whatsoever to move our
Internet routes to IPv6 right now. NAT/PAT gets the job done just fine, and it
will be many years, probably the better part of a decade, before we feel the
need to start routing IPv6 onto the Internet.

Internally, we're 100% deployed in RFC 4193 space, so when we do decide to
route IPv6 to the internet, we'll need to NAT/PAT on our firewalls anyways -
the same way we do with IPv4. Whenever we need to reach an IPv6 host over an
IPv4 transit network, RFC 2893 does the job quickly and efficiently.

IPv6 brings us some advantages, Stateless Address Assignment, Reduced chance
of address conflict when we communicate with other companies via IPv6,
intelligent use of multicast, elimination of CIDR - but none of these are
relevant when communicating to the Internet. That, more than anything else, is
why people are _not_ moving off of IPv4 more quickly to IPv6 - After 8+ years
of using/managing IPv6 every day - none of our network engineers/IT team
really see any pressing motivation.

[edit: I would be interested in hearing comments from other practitioners
whose experience was different from mine. I'd also be interested in hearing if
other major enterprises are deploying in RFC 4193 space, or, are considering
exposing their internal address topology to the Big-I Internet - i.e. Not
using NAT6/PAT6]

~~~
agwa
Have you considered getting provider-independent address space and using that
instead of ULA? (Or, if it's too difficult to switch now, _would_ you have
done that if you could go back and do it all over again?) You sound like a big
organization that could easily justify the allocation. I understand small
sites, who can't justify the allocation or just don't want to pay the fees,
using ULA+NAT to avoid renumbering hassles, but if you're big enough for PI
why not use it? It's just as convenient as ULA but is also globally routable
so you get to take NAT out of the equation.

~~~
ghshephard
When we first started rolling out our addresses (2004) - it looked very much
like any address space we requested, would be locked to the ISP that we were
connected to. Many of our nodes we run for large utilities, and we wanted to
have the flexibility to hand them over to the other organizations without any
paperwork. RFC 4193 let's us carve out /48s at will, assigning a /48 per
customer, that is in no-way connected to any ISP.

Also, and I recognize this is a very unpopular perspective among some, so
apologies in advance, we don't want anybody on the Internet to know what our
internal addresses are. And we also want to eliminate any possibility of
direct routing from the internet. Going with RFC 4193 (AKA ULA, AKA IPv6's
answer to RFC 1918) allows us to carve out an address space that, even if it
did somehow become known to the internet - wouldn't do them a lot of good,
because they can't route to it.

A lot of people think that renumbering is as simple as plugging in a new
address to be advertised off the router - but what they forget is the huge
number of places in which those IPv6 addresses (and networks) have been
plumbed into other router configurations (RFC 2893 6in4 tunnel configurations)
- not to mention all of the network diagrams, and databases. RFC4193 means
that we don't have to worry about renumbering, and, if we chose to hand it off
to a third party, their is a probabilistically insignificant chance that they
are using that space, so merging is trivial.

------
cdf
I used to work for the consulting arm of a telco, and the projects with the
telco direct involvement demanded IPv6 compliance by early 2013.

You would think that working with a telco, getting IPv6 is easy. Except it is
not. It is a mountain of extra monthly costs with absolutely no business
benefit whatsoever on both the server end and the user end. Other than an IPv6
lab, we have no means of testing and no user we are aware of has access to
IPv6. Furthermore, my tiny project team still had a truckload of pre-allocated
IPv4 addresses that are still unused.

Despite the doomsday talk, I really fail to see how IPv6 is going to take off
any time soon. Even my proposal to put one machine out there with HAProxy to
redirect IPv6 to IPv4 addresses is getting lukewarm support from management as
at the time of my departure just last month.

~~~
ghshephard
IPv6 is an _awesome_ protocol for telemetry networks, and for mobile networks
in which address mobility is required for millions (or 10s of millions) of
devices. All of the carriers/companies that I talk with from time to time who
need to deal with those two problems (> 10 million devices, and address
mobility, that is, those 10 million+ devices can move around from network to
network quickly) - see a lot of value in IPv6; it's the right tool for that
job.

------
meaty
Hmm quango resigns.

And it's promoted as a bad thing?

