IPv6 Blog

Citrus IT has become our first customer to enable IPv6 on their services hosted in our Datacentres. You can now visit their IPv6 enabled website at www.citrus-it.co.uk.

Over the last few weeks we have been completing the process of upgrading all of our customer internet switches and routers to support IPv6. We have now completed these upgrades and can offer IPv6 to customers in each of our datacentres.

The next step in our rollout plan was to setup IPv6 DNS servers. This was completed yesterday with two new servers going live that will give out AAAA DNS records and provide IPv6 reverse DNS to our customers.

You can now also visit the Node4 website using www.node4ipv6.co.uk if you have an IPv6 internet connection. We will be enabling IPv6 on our main www.node4.co.uk page over the next couple of weeks.

If you are interested in getting an IPv6 address range please contact support@node4.co.uk for further details.

Earlier this week we completed the upgrade of our Internet switches in our Leeds datacentre. This will now allow us to provide IPv6 connectivity to all of our customers at this location. If you are interested in IPv6 connectivity at DC3 please contact our support team for more details.

We have now begun the process of rolling out IPv6 to our corporate infrastructure, this involved configuring IPv6 on our Cisco ASA firewalls and allowing client devices to configure an IPv6 address.

We have allowed our clients to automatically setup IPv6 addresses using stateless-auto configuration for now while we look at the options available for DHCP. We also setup as Windows 2008 DNS server to support IPv6 AAAA DNS records in our corporate network as well as providing name resolution for web browsing. This allowed us to browse to our first IPv6 websites!

We’ve now been testing this for a few days and everything seems to be running smoothly.

If you are interested in IPv6 connectivity with Node4 please contact our support or sales teams for further details.

We have now begun rolling out IPv6 to our customer edge switches, so far this is restricted to certain Datacentre halls and isn’t yet available to all of our customers. If you are a DC4 Northampton customer or have colocation in our Derby DC2 Hall 2 location we can now provide you with your own IPv6 allocation.

In fact our first customer was allocated their address space this morning!

We will be planning software/hardware upgrades to our remaining switches in the coming weeks to allow us to rollout IPv6 to the remainder of our network.

Since our last update to the IPv6 blog we have spent time planning and getting our heads around IPv6 addressing and subnetting. This has been a steep learning curve; learning to count in hexadecimal was certainly a challenge!

The first step on the road to implementing IPv6 in our network was to develop an addressing plan and decide how we would break up our /32 allocation which we received from RIPE. We have decided to break this down to give us a block of addresses for all of our needs then allocating the rest of the range to each of our datacentre customers. Our plan will be to allocate a /48 subnet (18 quintillion addresses) to each customer.

Our next step was then to rollout IPv6 to our core network and then setup IPv6 peering with our transit providers to give us an IPv6 Internet routing table.

This is where things started to get interesting. We then connected a laptop to the network and gave it an IPv6 address and used a public IPv6 DNS server to test internet connectivity. We successfully managed to browse to some popular websites, google, facebook, hurricane electric, etc.

Now we have proved IPv6 connectivity we are now beginning the process of rolling out IPv6 connectivity to our Customer facing edge switches. Once this is complete we will be in a position to allocate addressing to our customers.

I plan to update this blog as the rollout progresses to keep everyone informed of our progress.

IPv6 has become a bit of a hot topic in the last couple of months. As of February 3, 2011, the last batch of 5 /8 address blocks were allocated to the Regional Internet Registries. These addresses could well be fully consumed within three to six months at current rates of allocation.

IPv6 was developed by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) to deal with the long-anticipated IPv4 address exhaustion. The IPv6  RFC was published back in 1998. ISP’s, and certainly end-users, have been slow to adopt IPv6 until recently.

At Node4 we’ve been looking at IPv6 for about twelve months. Last year we built a small lab and did some research, but like the majority of other UK ISP’s we didn’t adopted it – primarily because our customers weren’t asking for it. However things have now moved on and at the beginning of the year we kicked off an internal IPv6 project to deploy it in to our network.

The purpose of this blog is to keep you, our customers, informed of our progress and to get you thinking about deploying IPv6 in your own networks.

So first to some basic questions:

Will the Internet stop working when addresses run out?
In a word no – IPv4 is going to be around for a few years to come.

Will there be enough IPv6 address?
I would hope so. IPv4 allows 32 bits for an Internet Protocol address, and can therefore support 4,294,967,296 addresses, IPv6 uses 128-bit addresses, so the new address space supports approximately 340 undecillion (or 3.4×1038) addresses.

I watched a web cast from LINX72 recently and one of speakers held up a box about the size of a house brick – he said that they had worked out that if the box represented all IPv4 addresses IPv6 addresses would be the mass of all the planets in our solar system!

As standard the regional registries are allocating ISP’s a /32 IPv6 prefix. With a recommendation that each customer is given a /48 prefix, that works out to approximately 65,000 /48 prefixes for each /32. So as you can see there are plenty of addresses to go around.

With this amount of addresses there is no need for NAT/PAT or private address space (although there are Link-local addresses which are akin to the private, non-routable addresses in IPv4). Every device can be given a globally unicast IPv6 address (Global unicast addresses, which are conventional, publicly routable address, just like conventional IPv4 publicly routable addresses).

Can I still get IPv4 addresses?
Yes at this time you can, however RIPE are being more stringent than ever with their allocation which means that ISP’s are being the same with theirs. If you can justify your use for the IPv4 addresses then you can still have them. As we make our way towards the end of 2011 it may get harder and harder to get a new allocation however no one knows exactly when all the addresses will run out. Therefore you should look to conserve and re-use exiting addresses by utilise Port Address Translation whenever possible.