[Article originally dated 14 January 2013]
“There’s no business case for IPv6.” “There’s no killer app for IPv6.” “I still have plenty of IPv4 addresses.” And so on and so forth. Who knew that the IETF was so wrong when they decided in 1992 that the world needed a new Internet protocol?
Well, there may be no killer app, but let’s look at why you (yes, you) should be interested in migrating your network to IPv6. In the teeth of the naysayers.
[Article originally dated 30 January 2013]
[Background: I used to run a separate company called Into6, specialising in IPv6 consultancy.]
Well, NZNOG 2013 has come and gone – and Into6 was there! We delivered two IPv6 security tutorials and a half-hour talk on same. Attendance seemed good, and the level of interest was very high.
[Article originally dated 4 February 2013]
At NZNOG 2013 I was lucky enough to score a Mikrotik RB951-2n. This is a tiny little router with a huge feature set. It has one wifi interface and five gigabit ethernet interfaces, all of which can be bridged, routed separately, fused into VLANs and so on. For $50, a remarkable package, though I didn’t even pay that – thanks, GoWireless NZ 🙂 It even does BGP, though it probably can’t handle the global routing table 🙂
After waiting a long time for iiNet to provide native IPv6, I finally made the move to Internode a year or so ago. [Update: Only to see iiNet buy Internode shortly thereafter…]
[Article originally dated 19 February 2013]
Routing in IPv6 is a much misunderstood thing! Not so much between routers, which works pretty much the same way as it always has with IPv4. The problem is the first hop – with IPv6 there may be several “default routers”, and selecting the first destination for an outbound packet is a process that seems shrouded in mystery. Read on for enlightenment!
[Article originally dated 28 February 2013]
Warning: This article is very old.
Once my little Mikrotik RB951-2n was working properly, I decided to give it a proper packet filter. My IPv6 hosts are all quite capable of defending themselves, but a packet filter at the border reduces traffic on the network, plus I wanted to see how Mikrotik did it.
[Article originally dated 7 March 2013]
Someone on a mailing list asked recently “What’s the best practice for IPv6 addressing?” The question got me thinking, and I thought I’d share some useful guidelines.
[Article originally dated 20 March 2013]
If you read the doco (like “man gai.conf“) you would be forgiven for thinking that the contents of /etc/gai.conf controlled source and destination address selection in IPv6. You would be wrong.
[Article originally dated 25 March 2013]
So you have an application. It was written (as far as you know) without IPv6 in mind, and now it has to work with IPv6. How hard is that going to be? Well, it depends on the application. Most of the following is not really Java specific (but some of it is).
[Article originally dated 25 March 2013]
NAT came into existence because of IPv4 address scarcity. With IPv6, that reason disappears. So, if we no longer need to multiplex addresses, should we retain NAT?
[Article originally dated 25 March 2013]
IPv6 source address selection must be very irritated; destination address selection gets all the press coverage.
This article will start to redress the balance, by talking about what IPv6 source address selection is, why it is needed, and how it works. If you want the nitty-gritty, check out RFC 6724 (which obsoletes RFC 3484).