World IPv6 Day

Well… has anyone noticed anything different about the ‘net?

stuartl@atomos ~ $ host www.google.com.au
www.google.com.au is an alias for www.google.com.
www.google.com is an alias for www.l.google.com.
www.l.google.com has address 74.125.237.52
www.l.google.com has address 74.125.237.48
www.l.google.com has address 74.125.237.49
www.l.google.com has address 74.125.237.50
www.l.google.com has address 74.125.237.51
www.l.google.com has IPv6 address 2404:6800:4006:802::1011

I knew World IPv6 day was coming up, but it seems it snuck up on me and I barely noticed. Likely a testament to the fact we run a dual-stack network here, and so everything magically Just Worked™ as it should. Indeed, a lot of websites are now dual-stack, as is much of the gentoo.org infrastructure, Google (as seen above), FaceBook, and numerous other sites.

Sadly, a lot of ISPs here in Australia did the demented ostrich act when it came to IPv6. I wonder how many technical support calls they received, with users complaining about websites being slow to load up or failing to connect.

iTel, formerly “Global Info-Links”, now calling themselves “South East Community Telco“… were one of the masses that drove their RFC791-only heads in the sand and pretended that the entire Internet can be compressed into 32-bits of address space. We’ve been waiting to hear back from them on their plans for addressing since January as we’d like to upgrade the 512/128kbps ADSL link we use here. (Anyone noticed this site tends to load up a bit slow? That 128kbps figure is the reason why.)

We’ve been with this ISP since 1996. That’s quite a long innings… We’ve stayed put because until now we’ve been happy with the service. 512kbps was quite fast when we upgraded from 56kbps PSTN dialup (14.4kbps dialup when we first started… still have that modem too!). These days it plods along, but the 128kbps uplink is a notable thorn in my side with my telecommuting. So we’re looking at ADSL2+.

However, there’s one hitch. iTel is only a fairly small ISP. At the moment they do the noble thing of providing static public addresses on IPv4 for all fixed-broadband customers, but how long will that last? The last thing I want, is to sign up a contract for 12 months, then find out that in 6 months they need to move us behind CGN (Carrier grade NAT) to squeeze in some more customers. That won’t fly for us. I’d ideally like to ditch the 6-in-4 tunnel I have with AARNet and go native, or at the very least, swap it with one terminated at the ISP, but that doesn’t seem to be happening anytime soon.

At the moment there is only one ISP I know of that offers any sort of IPv6 connectivity. Internode. Kudos to them for taking the pioneering step! I’m seriously looking in their direction. I’m also hoping the NBN that we keep hearing about, is IPv6 enabled… and I’m holding out with the hope that our little suburb might soon be getting the long strands of glass laid down our street. If it’s only another year or so, it may be worth just hanging on with ADSL1 until then.

Thankfully, we do have the 6-in-4 tunnel through AARNet (and my greatest gratitude to them for providing it). There is a growing community on this newer protocol… I’m also happy to report absolutely 0 spam via IPv6… any spam or malware thus far has been via IPv4 … although I know this won’t last. The good news there is that with one unique address per computer (instead of per customer, or worse, per 100+ customers), it should be easier to track down the guilty party causing such Internet shenanigans. CGN by comparison is likely to be a spammer’s playground.

What am I doing about IPv6 deployment? Aside from my small-time tinkering with the network here… any socket programming I do today is at the very least dual-stack. One of my hobby projects is a digital mode stack for amateur radio… if I get my way it’ll be IPv6-only when used on a computer network.

One of my work projects involves interfacing some proprietary software to some power meters using RS-232 and RS-485 to Ethernet bridging devices. Even though the devices themselves are IPv4 only (and will be for the foreseeable future), I’m designing the software to handle IPv6. Doing this, future proofs the software. Surprisingly, I’m finding it easier to just design for dual-stack than it is to develop a IPv4-only application. If you’re building an application today, dual-stack IMHO must be part of the strategy if the application is going to work beyond this decade.

Some have asked about IPv6 on packet… sadly AX.25 packet does not go anywhere near fast enough to make IPv6 (or indeed, IPv4) networking a viable option on packet radio using existing TNCs… however I think IPv6 will, and should, play a much bigger part in amateur radio communications than it presently does… we can’t expect to hold on to the 44.0.0.0/8 subnet for much longer.

To the ISPs that are lagging behind, I say get moving! IPv4 is older than I am! This is especially true of the smaller ISPs… if you don’t move, you will get squeezed out of the future Internet connection market as address space gets consumed. To the nay-sayers who keep telling us that something else will replace IPv4, to you I say get moving… you haven’t got long to invent this magical silver bullet, in fact I say you’ve left it too late.

Tags: amateur-radioax.25ipv6linux.conf.aupacket-radio