Introduction
There is a simple introduction to IPv6 from Juniper. Basically it increases the address space from 32bits(IPv4) to 128bits (IPv6). We are running out of IPv4 addresses especially in Asia. For sometime now, at SLAC 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 (IPAM) 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 the 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.
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, and there is currently no IPv6 project at SLAC.
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 code (pinger2.pl) will work with both IPv4 and IPv6. This was part of an IPv6 project at SLAC many years ago that used the SLAC IPv6 allocation about which there is a presentation. Thus for monitoring sites pinger2.pl should be OK.
- A simple place to start would be traceroute.pl, since it does not require access any external modules, and is conceptually very simple. Some work has been done on this already, but only tested at NASA. It uses ping6 and traceroute6.
- I suspect ping_data.pl will need some mods also.
Once pinger2.pl, traceeroute.pl and pinger_data.pl have been made IPv6
It would be good to have a test bench, e.g. an IPv6 host on which we can debug the modified applications.
Converting PingER etc to IPv6 could be an interesting project for someone who wants to be in the vanguard.
Hints
An IPv6 host is ipv6.google.com(2001:4860:800f::68)
You can use http://www.subnetonline.com/pages/ipv6-network-tools/online-ipv6-ping.php to see if a host is reachable with IPv6.
The Linux online manual has a very useful chapter on IPv6-ready test/debug programs