Introduction
For sometime now we have only been buying network equipment that is IPv6 compliant. However there is a big step from the network being able to carry IPv6 to actually using it. For example at the network layer one needs IP Address Management tools that support IPv6 so one can track/manage assigning IPv6 addresses and support DHCPv6, DNSv6 etc. The even bigger problem, however, is the applications that rely on IPv4. Just to take one dear to our heart
PingER archiving analysis relies on IPv4 addresses. Thus as we move to IPv6 we will need to modify PingER to accept both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses.
Steps
One of the first steps will be to choose a perl module to support authentication of IPv6 addresses. Examples possibly include:
I believe the measurements will work with both IPv4 and IPv6. Thus for monitoring sites pinger2.pl should be OK.
However, traceroute.pl will need some mods, furthermore it must not require any external modules so it will need to be in inline code. Some work has been done on this already, but only tested at NASA.
I suspect ping_data.pl will need some mods.
It would be good to have a test bench, e.g. an IPv6 host on which we can debug the modified applications.
The US Federal government have said that Federal sites must have outward facing services (web, NFS, email etc) working with IPv6 October 2012, and inward facing services working on IPv6 by October 2014. SLAC is not a Federal site it is a contractor (Stanford) operated site. The DoE it will take a lead but that still has not defined our role at SLAC.
Converting PingER etc to IPv6 could be an interesting project for someone who wants to be in the vanguard.