Christmas is coming! Here in Sweden we celebrate tomorrow, on Christmas Eve. Which means that this week has been busy with other chores than writing about IPv6. To keep you busy learning IPv6 while I prepare the Christmas bread I have gathered a few links for you to spend 30 minutes on this week.
The Gävle Christmas Goat and IPv6
Torbjörn Ekelöv, a well-known IPv6 guru here in Sweden, has been experimenting with a webcam of the Christmas Goat in Gävle for two years to measure traffic – and to let people keep an eye on the goat. It’s a goat that has a short life-span every year. Read his story on CircleID and see how it relates to IPv6!
“Last year the municipality of Gavle asked my company if we could help them load share the streaming pictures of the famous Christmas goat in Gävle. I accepted the invitation and set up a separate domain. My own interest in this was of course to track the usage of IPv6 and validation of DNSSEC from the visitors of the site. “
Make IPv6 your New Year’s Promise!
TeamArin has written a series of articles named “The 12 days of IPv6″ that is worth reading. Number 11 is titled ” Survey Suggests IPv6 Is a 2012 New Year’s Resolution for Many“. Add yourself to the list. The Internet Service Providers and the Hosting Centers are gearing up to provide you with IPv6. Make sure that you do not delay the process! Promise yourself to spend more time on learning and implementing IPv6 next year!
What happens if IPv6 doesn’t catch on?
Day 7 of TeamArin’s blog quoted an article in Network World that discussed what would happen if IPv6 doesn’t catch on. Here’s a quote of their quote:
“Increased Complexity of Internet Infrastructure–Multiple layers of network address translation (NAT) devices would be required to share limited IPv4 addresses among a rapidly growing base of users and devices in contrast to the well thought-out architecture that is IPv6.
Increased Costs–Attempting to hang onto an IPv4 Internet would cause us to see workarounds, hacks and other Internet problems which would have significant cost impacts.
Stifled Innovation–The Internet would become increasingly fragile which would have a negative effect on potential development of application or service innovation. Moreover, existing companies would hold all existing address space, closing out Internet access to innovative startups.”
Go read the article now! If you want to read all of TeamArin’s IPv6 blogs, you can find them here.
Experiences from an IPv6-only world
While dual-stack will be running for a long time on servers, it would be easier if we could install new users and devices on a single-stack network. This of course lowers the cost of management and configuration. Engineers at Ericsson put themselves on an IPv6-only network and tried working as usual. Some systems did not work and users moved away, but for a large number of users it worked out quite OK. They wrote an Internet Draft about the experience, a document that has a lot of good information in it for application developers. Read it!
“Based on our experiences, it is possible to live (and work) with an IPv6-only network. For instance, at the time of this writing, one of the authors has been in an IPv6-only network for about a year and half and has had no major problems.”
The first time I tried this at the SIPit interoperability events most systems complained that they where not connected to a network and shut down the whole network stack or simply refused to connect. We need to keep trying to make sure that all applications work in this kind of network and that we can turn off IPv4. In Mac OS/X Lion they added the ability to turn off IPv4 while keeping IPv6 running, which is nice for testing!
A Merry Christmas to you and your 128 bits!
It’s time to start cooking the traditional Swedish Christmas Ham, heat up the Glögg and to wrap the final gifts. I wish you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year! Let’s meet again in 2012 and help each other to fulfill the New Year’s Promise – 128 bits on every public server, 128 bits internally and 
less than 128 bits of weight gain during all the festivities…
Olle