[c-nsp] IPv6

[Gert Doering]

Hi,

On Wed, Mar 17, 2010 at 11:15:54AM +0100, Peter Rathlev wrote:
> Right now our problem is to make the upper layers in our organisation
> understand why IPv6 is a good idea. The rise in cost (primarily OpEx),
> though being relatively small, is hard to justify to non-technical
> management people. 

The gain/cost really depends on what your business is.  

If it's "provide consulting services to other enterprises", IPv6 is 
starting to become a really hot topic, and one obviously needs to gain 
experience to do proper consulting :-)

If it's more along the lines of "provide connectivity services" (access
or hosting) it still makes sense to get started now - enable upstream,
enable first services, gain experience - to be ready when the big
uproar starts next year.

"Be prepared, avoid a Y2K rush later" would be my answer, and the
cost is manageable if you don't go for "everything at once"...

> (Most of our equipment can handle IPv6 (sort of) but
> without training/experience things are going to be more cumbersome and
> thus more expensive. And training is expensive.)

For a good IPv4 engineer, IPv6 is basically "IP with more bits".  

All the routing protocols (BGP, OSPF, ...), L4 protocols (TCP, UDP), 
L5-7 protocols (SMTP, HTTP, traceroute, ping) work very similar to what 
you already know.

The addresses definitely look very funny, and reverse DNS is painful :-)

There is lots of differences in the fine details, of course, but in the
overall picture "what do I have to do to make traffic flow from here
to there, and then have an application to handle it", all you already
know is still valid.

> The current discussions about policy and "do we have enough address
> space", combined with e.g. the spat between Cogent/HE/Telia (cf. NANOG
> thread from October 2009) doesn't help. As Patrick Gilmore said about
> IPv6: "It either is or is not production ready.".

I've heard only good things about Telia, and mostly bad things about Cogent
- so congratulations for being with Telia.

> But in the end there's only us (i.e. me, my colleagues and my employer)
> to blame for our lack of using IPv6. I'm not proud of that. :-)

Point out that your lack of IPv6 has already been made topic of a public 
mailing list already :-)

gert
-- 
USENET is *not* the non-clickable part of WWW!
                                                           //www.muc.de/~gert/
Gert Doering - Munich, Germany                             gert at greenie.muc.de
fax: +49-89-35655025                        gert at net.informatik.tu-muenchen.de
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