I’m visiting the V6 World Congress 2012 together with collegue Erwin Blekkenhorst (a long time IPv6 adept and owner of ipv6.net as well as its corresponding Facebook web page). This IPv6 congress is held Feb 7-10 in Paris, France.
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Central question of this congress is: “Enterprises Migration: How and When?”
Amongst others, both Erwin and me are IPv6 task force members within Schuberg Philis and we are determined to increase the IPv6 awareness with our fellow collegues and our customers. The questions we would like to address are: How will it impact us, our business and what will it mean to our customers, what are the ways to ‘migrate’ safely from IPv4 to IPv6 resp to operate a dual stack setup?
On this blog I’ll be posting our experiences and impressions of this congress on a day-to-day basis.
Day 1 – Technical Tutorial Day – Tue Feb 7th
| 1 | Basic Design Concepts of IPv6 and the differences with IPv4 by Peter van de Velde – Cisco Belgium |
| This presentation discussed the various characteristics of IPv6 protocol also when compared to IPv4. This presentation was a ‘so-so’ start with information already widely known but it was a start nonetheless. The stop word of Gunter ‘as such’ at some point became a bit annoying after a while. | |
| 2 | Innovative IPv6 First Hop Security (FHS) and Technologies Regarding V4 to V6 Translation by Andrew Yourtchenko – Cisco Technical Leader |
| Interesting presentation focussing on L2 security including defining trust relationship with hosts and their nearest router(s) aka router authorization, securing link-operation, RA-Guard, SeND, Address Watch and Device tracking. Things that I learned was ‘address glean‘ to monitor address allocation and store bindings (to glean = to gather slowly and with extreme care, bit by bit). It was a boring presentation but with interesting topics. Andrew is a good an passionate speaker, but this subject is really something you need to dive into by looking into the slides, reading through the theory and eventuelly actually getting your hands dirty on it to really understand what the different technologies mean and how you could use it to its advantage. | |
| 3 | IPv6 and the BGP Routing Infrastructure by Susan Hares – Distinguished Engineer, Huawei Technologies |
| Surprisingly interesting presentation especially due to the many statistics on BGP routing explaining the nature of evalution and migration from IPv4 to IPv6. A topic I really need to understand better. Things I learned was the IPv4 Address report and its IPv6 equivalent. Susan also referred to Geoff Huston’s work in the IPv6 arena. Another thing I have never heard of was a bogon. Its definition on wikipedia is a bogus IP address. Susan is a scientist and clearly an experienced person in the BGP area. She calls herself a BGP geek. How true. | |
| 4 | Content Providers and ISP projects to enable IPv6 on their site or for their access networks by Jordi Palet Martinez – ConsulIntel |
| This presentation was the best presentation of the day from my point of view. It discussed the theory of migration versus coexistence and transition. IPv4 will still be around for the next decades and can not -by nature- simply be turned off nor deprecated. The terminology ‘migration’is therefor not really describing the challange instead it is confusing. Jordi discussed the native IPv6 versus dual stack, tunneling and NAT approaches.His conclusions were: 1. Dual stack as much as possible. 2. Tunneling, managed as much as possible via softwires or 6RD 3. Tunneling, unmanaged if no other way via technologies like Teredo or 6to4NAT 4. Translation & CGN like NAT64, DS-LITE, NAT444.Next Jordi discussed his experiences in Spain at the Ministry of Industry, Tourism and Trade (MITYC) and at a Spanish publisher. Another interesting topic was his experiences with the IPv6 Awareness and Training Road show in Spain.His conclusions were: 1. Do not design nor implement IPv6 as an IPv4 project. 2. Training and knowledge is essential 3. Planning is key 4. A V6 implementation might not be as expensive as you might think, as many old networks devices and servers already support IPv6 (if necessary after firmware or OS upgrade). |
