Happy IPv6 Day, What Did You Get?

World IPv6 day, where Web properties around the world test drive their sites using the IPv6 protocol, is today. It's not a holiday by anyone's real stretch of the imagination, nor is it a full-on switch-out. But it will be a milestone in the ultimate, slow transition from current IPv4 addressing to IPv6 addressing.

According to the Internet Society's FAQ page on the event, "is a global-scale test flight of IPv6 sponsored by the Internet Society. On World IPv6 Day, major Web companies and other industry players will come together to enable IPv6 on their main Web sites for 24 hours. The goal is to motivate organizations across the industry -- Internet service providers, hardware makers, operating system vendors and Web companies -- to prepare their services for IPv6 to ensure a successful transition as IPv4 address space runs out."
Basically this is one big 24-hour awareness event to prepare us all for what life will be like after all the current 32-bit IP addresses run out.
Oh, wait, that already happened.

There is no sign of any kind of catastrophic collapse now that there's no more unallocated IPv4 addresses, but there is a little bit more urgency in the efforts to get people to pay more attention to IPv6. But the fact that there's no Year 2000-type disaster looming in the headlines seems to have put a damper on IPv6 network deployments.
The trick to implementing IPv6 may be not treating it as a upgrade migration project -- at least in traditional terms. When you upgrade software, for instance, the older version of the software is typically removed, and your organization must deal with the consequences -- good and bad -- of the new software version.
But when implementing IPv6, there's no reason to eliminate IPv4. In fact, you would not want to, because a vast majority of networked servers will still roll with IPv4 in a dual-stack or tunneling scenario for a long time. Instead, when you swap out existing infrastructure for any reason, all you need to do is just make sure the new equipment or software is IPv6-compliant. Then it's just a matter of taking a little extra time to make sure IPv6 is running alongside IPv4 for that new component.
That's a piecemeal way of solving the problem, of course. Even as you roll out IPv6-compatible components, you will also need to identify all of the components in your infrastructure that actually need IPv6. It could be a big list, depending on the size of your organization, because there's a lot of IT assets that are network enabled. Client computers, Web servers, file servers, printers, routers, WiFi, firewalls, switches... even any mobile device your organization for which has responsibility.
Without a complete inventory, there could come a day when your organization will switch over to IPv6 and discover gaping deadzones in your network topology because of one forgotten switch somewhere.

The new protocol is about more than just packets. You also need to make sure IPv6 can do the tasks you need it to do. IPv6 is a protocol that is still relatively immature as an application platform. There are still a lot of things that IPv4 can do that IPv6 users can't, because there may not be networking applications that are IPv6 ready.
In May, for instance, Cisco took a big step forward in solving this problem when it released a new version of its IOS platform with a reported 200 new IPv6 features.
"Our biggest goal in IOS now is to have parity between IPv4 and IPv6," Faraz Aladin, director, Marketing Cloud Switching and Services at Cisco told InternetNews.com. "Whatever you can do in IPv4, you should be able to do with IPv6."

Some of this is really basic stuff, too. The Cisco announcement in May highlighted the availability of the Network Time Protocol in IPv6. But in truth, any application that uses IP addresses will need to be updated.
Finally, you will need to make a plan on how to handle network security. There are some experts who are suggesting that you won't need network allocation tables (NATs) at the edges of your network anymore. With 2128 addresses available, you don't need an internal set of IP addresses contained behind firewalls. Each machine or device can have their own IP address. But if your network is on the same topology level as the entire Internet, what does that mean for security?
Right now, security is probably the biggest question mark for IPv6 deployment, because network security relies in well-defined network edges, ideally guarded by the firewall. If NATs went away, the firewall would have to maintain security across a fuzzier boundary. It's been suggested that with the huge network segments available in IPv6, malicious hackers would have to scan your network segment for years to find a potentially vulnerable target. Great, but what if you have to run the same kind of scan for internal vulnerabilities?
Another potential angle of attack: IP options in IPv6 like destination or authentication information aren't found in the main header, but in extension headers. This means an IPv6 packet is roughly put together like this: Main header and extension headers and packet content. Malicious packets could contain specific extension information or just a ton of junk extension data that might potentially choke the target device.
Security, then, will be the space to watch as you start moving towards IPv6. You must make sure you have efficient security tools in place that follow the best practices--which are even now being put together. Until these issues are solved, start making that inventory, and analyze which applications use IP addressing. Then you will be ready to swim into IPv6 when the lifeguards say the water is safe.

Thanks to Author
Author-Brian Proffitt , Internet news

Free DNS service adds IPv6 support

OpenDNS, one of the Internet's most popular free DNS services, is now offering production-grade support for IPv6, an upgrade to the Internet's main communications protocol known as IPv4.
OpenDNS CEO David Ulevitch says he is launching the IPv6 service now to help website operators and networking firms prepare for World IPv6 Day, a 24-hour test of IPv6 that is scheduled for June 8. Sponsored by the Internet Society, World IPv6 Day has attracted more than 160 participants, including some of the Internet's leading content providers, such as Google, Yahoo and Facebook.
"World IPv6 Day ... is all about getting organizations to make their resources available over IPv6," Ulevitch says. "It's a flag day. It's a point that you can use to convince your boss that IPv6 is worthwhile. ... It's not really for the end users; it's really for the network administrators, the IT guys, to figure out that it's not that hard to do IPv6."
OpenDNS says it will participate in World IPv6 Day by having all of its Web sites support IPv6 by default on June 8.
BACKGROUND: Is free DNS a good deal for business?
OpenDNS said it was the first to offer a free DNS recursive service that supports IPv6. Recursive DNS services allow Internet users to find websites by typing in their domain names and pulling up the corresponding IP numbers. In contrast, authoritative DNS services allow website operators to publish their domain names and corresponding IP addresses to Internet users.
"We are not aware of anybody else doing" a free recursive DNS service that supports IPv6, Ulevitch says. "There's no financial angle; we just want to encourage people to use an IPv6 DNS service."
Until now, network engineers experimenting with IPv6 had to encapsulate their traffic to transverse IPv4-based DNS servers.
"People want to experiment with IPv6, and we have DNS set up to support them," Ulevitch says. "We are trying to help push traffic and resources over to IPv6. If you actually want to reach IPv6-only resources, you need to use DNS resources that you can talk to over IPv6."
The IPv6 addresses for the OpenDNS IPv6 DNS Sandbox are: 2620:0:ccc::2 and 2620:0:ccd::2.
Internet companies like OpenDNS are promoting IPv6 because the Internet is running out of IPv4 addresses.
IPv4 uses 32-bit addresses and can support 4.3 billion devices connected directly to the Internet. Most IPv4 addresses have been handed out. The free pool of unassigned IPv4 addresses was depleted in February, and the Asia Pacific regional Internet registry said in April that it has doled out all but its last 16.7 million IPv4 addresses which are being held in reserve for startup network operators.

IPv6, on the other hand, uses 128-bit addresses and supports a virtually unlimited number of devices -- 2 to the 128th power. But despite its promise of an endless supply of address space, IPv6 represents only a tiny fraction -- less than 0.03% -- of Internet traffic.
Ulevitch said the new OpenDNS IPv6 service would allow Internet users to access IPv6-only websites, which he admits are a "very,very small'' portion of Internet resources.
OpenDNS says it has more than 20 million users globally, representing 1% of all Internet users. The company's free service is popular with U.S. public school systems, while its paid enterprise version has attracted corporations of all sizes.

India Enters Supercomputer Race, Builds 220 TeraFLOPS Machine

The 220 teraflops supercomputer will be used by space scientists for solving complex aerospace problems

BANGALORE, INDIA: Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) announced on Monday that it has built a supercomputer,

which is to be India's fastest supercomputer in terms of theoretical peak performance of 220 TeraFLOPS

(220 Trillion Floating Point Operations per second).

The supercomputing facility named as Satish Dhawan Supercomputing Facility is located at Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre (VSSC), Thiruvananthapuram. The new Graphic Processing Unit (GPU) based 220 teraflops supercomputer named "SAGA-220"

(Supercomputer for Aerospace with GPU Architecture-220 TeraFLOPS) is being used by space scientists for solving complex

aerospace problems. The supercomputer SAGA-220 was inaugurated by Dr K Radhakrishnan, Chairman, ISRO today at VSSC.

"SAGA-220" Supercomputer is fully designed and built by Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre using commercially available hardware,

open source software components and in house developments. The system uses 400 NVIDIA Tesla 2070 GPUs and

400 Intel Quad Core Xeon CPUs supplied by Wipro with a high speed interconnect. It cost Rs 14 crore to build.

With each GPU and CPU providing a performance of 500 GigaFLOPS and 50 GigaFLOPS respectively, the theoretical

peak performance of the system amounts to 220 TeraFLOPS.

The present GPU system offers significant advantage over the conventional CPU based system in terms of cost,

power and space requirements, said ISRO. It also added that the system is environmentally green and consumes a power

of only 150 kW. This system can also be easily scaled to many PetaFLOPS (1000 TeraFLOPS).

The End Is Near: Last Blocks of IPv4 Addresses Assigned

The end is near -- for IPv4 addresses, that is. In a public ceremony Thursday, the last blocks of addresses based on the current Internet Protocol were assigned to regional Internet registries (RIR). Those addresses are projected to be given out by the RIRs by September, at which point the future expansion of the Internet will be dependent on a successful transition to the next generation.
Each block contains 16 million addresses, and one block went to each of the five regional organizations, covering Africa, the Asia Pacific region, America, Europe and the Middle East, and the Latin American and Caribbean region. The hand-off was conducted at a public ceremony in Miami by four international nonprofit groups that collaboratively administer the Internet addressing system.
'Only a Matter of Time'
Raúl Echeberría, chairman of the RIR umbrella organization, the Number Resource Organization, said "it's only a matter of time before the RIRs and Internet service providers must start denying requests for IPv4 address space." He added that "deploying IPv6 is now a requirement, not an option."
Laura DiDio, an analyst with Information Technology Intelligence Corp., said handing out of the final batch is "definitely a wake-up call" for businesses and consumers to get with the transition.
Businesses need to make sure they have a transition plan, she said, including an examination of whether they have applications that are dependent on IPv4.
Three main factors are behind the now-in-sight depletion of IPv4 addresses. One is the explosion in web access from multiple devices for each user, primarily in developed countries. Each of those smartphones, laptops, tablets, desktops and other devices that access the web require a different IP, or Internet Protocol, address. And the demand for device addresses is increasing rapidly, with TVs, game consoles, even automobiles beginning to offer web-browsing capabilities.
'50 Thousand Trillion Trillion Addresses'
A second factor is a rapidly growing user base in developing countries such as Brazil, India and China. Many users in those countries access the web through mobile devices, which means the device-per-user ratio is also likely to rapidly increase.
And third, the Internet is becoming the communications network for non-user-based equipment, such as smart electricity grids, sensors, RFIDs and smart houses.
IPv4 dates back to 1980 and a time when its 4.5 billion addresses seemed like a lot. The new IPv6 utilizes 128-bit addresses, instead of IPv4's 32-bit, and the new IP could offer -- if needed -- a vast number of addresses that should keep humanity happy until the sun burns out.
Some experts say IPv6 could provide four billion addresses for each person on Planet Earth. But Dave Evans, Cisco's chief technologist in its Internet business solutions group, has said the actual number is closer to "50 thousand trillion trillion addresses per person."
In addition to zillions of new addresses, IPv6 brings other improvements, including in routing, network autoconfiguration, better handling of 3G mobile networks, and other advantages.