Category: IPv6

One of the areas where IPv6 sorely lacks feature parity with IPv4 is user authentication and source IP spoofing prevention in large-scale Carrier Ethernet networks. Metro Ethernet switches from numerous vendors offer all the IPv4 features a service provider needs to build a secure and reliable access network where the users can’t intercept other users’ traffic or spoof source IP addresses, and where it’s always possible to identify the end customer from an IPv4 address – a mandatory requirement in many countries. Unfortunately, you won’t find most of these features in those few Metro Ethernet switches that support IPv6.

While preparing for my Rome IPv6 seminar, I had to reinvent a few wheels, including slides explaining IPv6 addressing and host behavior ... giving me a perfect reason to study the RFCs and figure out how exactly IPv6 stateless autoconfiguration (RFC 4862) works.

Ethan Banks, one of the masterminds behind the Packet Pushers podcast, wrote a spot-on blog describing why enterprises don’t deploy IPv6. Unfortunately, most of the enterprise networking engineers follow the same line of reasoning, and a few of them might feel like the proverbial deer caught in the headlights once something totally unexpected happen ... like their CEO vacationing in China, getting only IPv6 address on the iPhone, and thus not being able to access a mission-critical craplication. For a longer-term perspective, read an excellent reply written by Tom Hollingsworth.

During my visit to South Africa someone told me that he got 6VPE working over an L2TP connection ... and that you should “use the other VRF attribute, not lcp:interface-config” to make it work. A few days ago one of the readers asked me the same question and although I was able to find several relevant documents, I wanted to see it working in my lab.

In the next few days, I'll write about some of the interesting topics we’ve been discussing during the last week’s fantastic on-site workshop with Ian Castleman and his team. To get us started, here’s a short video describing BGP/IGP network design principles. It’s taken straight from my Building IPv6 Service Provider Core webinar (recording), but the principles apply equally well to large enterprise networks.

With the latest software release (12.3.01) the ServerIron ADX, Brocade’s load balancer product, supports the real NAT64 (not 6-to-4 load balancing). Even more, it supports all of the features I would like to see in a NAT64 box plus a few more:

True NAT64 support, mapping the whole IPv4 address space into an IPv6 prefix that can be reached by IPv6 clients. One would truly hope the implementation is conformant with RFC 6146, but the RFC is not mentioned in the documentation and I had no means of checking the actual behavior. DNS64 is not included, but that’s not a major omission as BIND 9.8.0 supports it.

Every time I write about lack of commercial NAT64 products (yeah, I know Juniper had one for a long time and Brocade just rolled out ADX code), someone tells me that company X has field-proven NAT64 product ... only most of them are really 6-to-4 load balancers. Let’s see what the difference is.

In a few minutes Jan Žorž, a true IPv6 evangelist, will open the Fifth Slovenian IP Summit. The event is focused on the World IPv6 Day and I decided to use a hypothetical case study: imagine your CIO just came back from an off-site social networking event where everyone got all hyped up about the World IPv6 Day.

Next thing you know, you’re in his office and he’s telling you the PR gurus have decided your organization simply has to participate in this revolutionary event. Assuming you haven’t invested in IPv6 yet, my presentation might serve as a short survival guide (hint: you have only 6 days left).

A few days ago I got an interesting question: “What’s your opinion on the IPv6 NDP exhaustion attack and the recommendation to use /120 instead of /64?”

I guess we all heard the fundamentalist IPv6 mantra by now: “Every subnet gets a /64.” Being a good foot soldier, I included it in my Enterprise IPv6 webinar. Time to fix that slide and admit what we also knew for a long time: IPv6 is classless and we have yet to see the mysterious device that dies in flames when sniffing a prefix longer than a /64.

Few days ago I enjoyed listening to the Teredo-bashing Packet Pushers Podcast during which Greg & the crew simply couldn’t avoid NAT64. Tom even wrote a follow-up post explaining why NAT is bad (we all agree with that) and why we shouldn’t use it in IPv6. Unfortunately he missed the elephant in the room: it’s all about the legacy content. IPv6-only residential users have to access IPv4-only content.