IPv6 - Looking for a home in Latin America

 Tue, 07 Jul 2009

It's been many a long year since anyone talked much about how IPv4, the current IP implementation, was going to be exhausted. IPv4 received several reprieves. The first was the obsoleting of classes (although even newbie admins with no idea about the origins of classes continue to use this obsolete term). CIDR, classless interdomain routing based not on quads, but on a variable length subnet mask (VLSM -- the subset of CIDR most folks really mean when they say CIDR). This allowed smaller blocks of IPs to be assigned. The real savior though was NAT, network address translation. This allowed tens, hundreds, even thousands of systems to hide behind one public IP.

Today, most savvy network admins will use private IPs for routing and save those precious public IPs for systems they need to be used on. Unfortunately, the use of private IPs and NAT introduces a wide range of problems, including, but not limited to, inability to reach those systems except from the internal network unless port forwarding has been implemented, inability to determine which NAT'd system may be abusing the network making all systems behind the public IP equally guilty and subject to the same "punishment" invoked on the public IP, and inability of some protocols to properly communicate through NAT.

Despite these stop-gap measures, demand for public IPs continues to soar. The demise of IPv4 hasn't been prevented, only postponed. This delay has lulled a great many into believing IPv4 will live on forever. I hate to be the one to break it to everyone, but hiding your head in the sand won't work for long. It's coming RSN, so start preparing.

I've never been one to wait until it's too late. But most Latin American countries are not adopting IPv6. They're not even testing it. I've tested and deployed it thanks to the numerous IPv6 tunnel brokers. Let me tell you if you think you're just going to deploy IPv6 when the IPv4 Internet goes away, think again. It took me months to find and work out all the little "kinks". I still have some wireless APs and clients that need to be replaced/updated, a couple of switches, and the like. I also had to learn about DNS, etc. Most folks will need 6-18 months. But do we have it?

A friend and client of mine who claims to know told me that when the IPv4 addresses are exhausted, they'll just turn off all IPv4 routing and resolving. That is the plan. That's frightening. That means many entire countries could be in the dark for months. Think that can't happen? The idea has already been given a dry-run. But don't take my word for it, there are several articles on the Internet talking about the day the IETF turned off IPv4. Granted they only did it in their own spaces, and all their systems were already dual-stacked -- that is they all had IPv4 and IPv6. They declared it an overwhelming success.

When will this happen and how much lead time will we all have? I have no idea. I'm hoping 18 months notice. I suspect 18 minutes notice. Either way, with some networking folks down here thinking that IPv6 is "something they're deploying in Europe", the specter is ominous.

There are a number of upsides to dual-stacking and no down sides. Even MicroSoft has implemented IPv6 stacks in Vista (installed by default) and XP (must be installed, but is readily available). All UNIX flavors including Mac, Cisco IOS, and more are IPv6 ready. Some intelligent (but cheap) switches aren't IPv6 ready, and many wireless devices also lack IPv6 support. Now is the time to find out and work toward a fix.

The good news, all around, is that IPv6 is easier to deploy than IPv4. Forward DNS zones will require a few more (and larger) numbers. Reverse zones are hateful. But all that can be overcome. And anyone who tells you there's no business case for IPv6 hasn't been paying attention or is telling you they can do business without the Internet. Few sane business people will make a statement like that.

Those who are reading this really need to push hard for IPv6 deployment. All tier-1 Internet providers I know of already have IPv6 deployed internally. Everyone else, particularly in Latin America, needs to begin. Yesterday if possible, but definitely today.

Don't be left out in the dark.

David-

IPv6 - Looking for a home in Latin America

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