[AusNOG] Less than 10% of IPv4 Addresses Remain Unallocated

[Mark Smith]

On Thu, 21 Jan 2010 15:17:00 +1030
Matthew Moyle-Croft <mmc at internode.com.au> wrote:

> 
> On 21/01/2010, at 2:21 PM, Mark Smith wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> Which particular ones / equipment? Networking gear (i.e. routers mainly)
> generally supports it and has done so for quite a while, as have most
> end-user OSes.
> 
> Support at some level.   There's a lot of fairly strange holes.
> 
> But productionising it is harder.   It's very easy to find holes in "support" as well as bugs.  Too easy.
> 
> eg.  On any Cisco platform try finding the status of an IPv6 BGP neighbor via SNMP.
> 
> 
> If you're talking about things like load balancers, I don't necessarily
> think that needs to be a show stopper. The early volumes of IPv6 traffic
> is going to be no where near that of IPv4, so I doubt the initial load
> is going to be significant enough that solutions like load balancers
> are required. I'd think deploying an IPv6 to IPv4 reverse proxy would be
> a fairly simple, quick and fairly way to get content available over
> IPv6.
> 
> Sure - but ultimately you then have hacks which are messy.  Really proper support is key otherwise you can't produce the systems that are as reliable as IPv4.   LB are often about reliability and failover rather than performance.
> 

Replying in reverse order,

Certainly my suggestion may not be a long term solution (although
using IPv4 as an internal transport protocol, similar to how Ethernet
is being used to carry Fibre channel may be a valid). It is "dipping
your toes in the water" with IPv6 though, so the content provider doing
it will gain experience with IPv6, even if it is a relatively small and
simple deployment. They'll gain value just from the exercise of
thinking through and organising the supporting infrastructure and
presenting a service to the Internet over IPv6. I think Google's
ipv6.google.com project would have provided that value to them.

Another advantage is that when you do go to a vendor and say that you
need feature X to be implemented, they'll know that you're not just
making an idle request - you're already a user of IPv6, your need for
this feature is a legitimate one, and that the missing feature you're
requesting is either currently creating a problem, or will in the near
future. 

Regards,
Mark.