It’s been a great three years but we will shut down go6.net on Monday, October 12 and replace it with gogoNET – Socal network and services for professionals to go v6.  The discussion groups are already locked down and replaced by the discussion groups on gogoNET.  Freenet6 is available here only until Monday after that the tunnel broker service and two new v6 services will be available in the Freenet6 section of gogoNET.  To register for gogoNET go to: gogonet.gogo6.com.  Thanks, Bruce

Well, the first day of gogoNET is almost complete.  Our invitation-only beta program has 30+ members so far – all from visitors like you to go6.net.  Our goal is for no more than 100 folks for the week.  If you want to join in on the fun, go to: gogonet.gogo6.com.

Please note that we will be locking down go6.net next week, including the discussion forums which will be moved over to gogoNET.  Thanks, Bruce

To watch a high level overview video on gogoNET please go to: http://www.youtube.com/user/gogo6videos#play/all/uploads-all/0/nmvSsUhh7Oo

We are looking for a small group of beta testers for gogoNET’s invitational beta period.  What better place to look than here, on go6.net.  So if you would like to checkout gogoNET early and help us make the site better, go to gogoNET.gogo6.com and register to become a member.  You will be able to enter the site on Tuesday after your membership is approved.

If you don’t know what gogoNET is please look here.  Thanks!

After months of development we are proud to introduce the successor to go6.net called gogoNET. Kind of a web 2.0 version of go6.net, it is a social network and services for professionals to go v6. We will be entering invitational beta next week, open beta a few weeks after that and then we will officially launch the site in November.

We had the same vision for go6.net then as we do for gogoNET today: to create an online meeting place where v6 professionals can go to learn about deploying IPv6, both with the resources we provide but more importantly, from others who have done it before. Anyone who has deployed v6 knows that it is best learned from trial and error and the hands-on experience of others. We built go6.net as a community portal which was state of the art at the time but lacked the functionality needed to create a truly interactive community. Over the years meaningful interaction was concentrated in the discussion forms while the rest of the communication was one-way. Today we have better technology to make this happen.

IPv6 Social Network
gogoNET uses the current state of the art to create an online communities – social networking. gogoNET is easy to use and has all the features you’ve come to expect from Facebook, Flickr, etc… except it’s 100% focused on v6. Since it uses the Ning platform new social networking functionality is being added all the time. gogoNET is currently the best way to interact with other v6 professionals who are also in the various stages of v6 deployment.

New Services
We are expanding the Freenet6 service. In addition to our popular tunnel broker service we are adding two new services:
- Freenet6 Reverse Tunnel: DSTM-based v4 in v6 tunneling for network operators testing v6-only networks who want to communicate with the v4 world.
- Freenet6 Home Access: a service that capitalizes on two of v6’s strengths: NAT traversal and P2P addressing. Home Access allows you to access v4/v6 devices in a private v4/v6 network from the v4/v6 Internet.

Lot of Resources
For launch we have loaded the site with the best v6 content the Internet has to offer – vetted, reviewed and indexed. Our staff focused on IPv6 videos, presentations and documents. Nicely packaged and all in one place, you can find the v6 info you need quickly and easily. Moving forward we are counting on members to update the site as new content becomes available.

Helping Hands
As your investigation into v6 progresses from the theoretical to the practical you will undoubtedly run into questions. If you can’t find the answers in our v6 resources and you are in too much of a rush to go to the gogoNET community for help, you have a third option: the gogoCLUB. This new premium service allows you to ask any v6 question to our v6 gurus and get a response within 24 hours. Think of it as micro consulting for a micro price.

gogoWARE
Lastly, we’ve integrated information on the products that power the Freenet6 service you use in order to understand how the services are implemented. gogoWARE allows you to provide similar services in your own network.

Looking forward to seeing you on gogoNET!

Bruce

In 2007 the IETF deprecated the NAT-PT translation solution (RFC4966) because translation was considered harmful. Less than two years later translation it is back in the IETF and back with force. During the 75th IETF meeting in Stockholm this week translation was one of the big topics and one of the topics with a great sense of urgency. The replacement for NAT-PT is now called NAT64 and offers a translation between IPv6 and IPv4 in much of the same ways as NAT-PT. There are of course differences to address the major issues that were brought up when NAT-PT was deprecated but it doesn’t address the issue with translation being in issue in general and that it might create some of the problems we are seeing today with NAT.
NAT64 is combined with DNS64 to create the complete translation package to allow IPv6 clients to access IPv4 servers. One major issue with NAT-PT was the fact that it broke DNSSec. This has been address with DNS64 which moves the generation of IPv6 addresses into the clients trusted domain.
In addition to NAT64 there are other translation solutions that are more focused on translating IPv4 to provide a greater IPv4 address independence by increasing the use of private IPv4 addresses. This was also considered bad just a few years ago but is now part of the central discussion with the IETF. Large scale NATs, or carrier grade NATs as they were called before people realised that NAT would never become carrier grade, are requested by some operators who aren’t concerned by the operational issues of running large private networks. Other translation proposals such as DS-lite try to run IPv4 on top of IPv6 in order not to have to care about IPv4 addressing.
All this translation is scary but some of it is inevitable as we quickly are getting close to the end of IPv4 and everybody agrees that we need to maintain supports for IPv4 clients at the edge one way or the other. Let’s just hope that the more sensible approaches as DS-lite prevail or we might end up with tons of nested NATs and no IPv6 and no more peer to peer communication.

At the recent ISOC Asia (1) conference in Kuala Lumpur a rather innocuous coffee break question was raised: could any one around the table name some of the major TLD’s still delinquent in their IPv6 support ? Nobody could answer on the spot but the question intrigued me.

A logical place to start looking for an answer was ICANN (2). Their Kim Davies provided a rather revealing perspective in a presentation (3) at ICANN 34 in april. 41% of the 280 existing TLD’s did not provide any IPv6 connectivity and more than 68% did without any diversity. Even for IPv4 it was surprising to see that 7.2% of TLD’s do not provide diversity, contrary to IANA rules. Two name servers separated by geography and topology are required and the same applies for IPv6 (gTLD applicant guidebook) (4).

IANA provides a list (5) of all legitimate TLD’s. including the recent fancy additions like .museum and the like.

Hurricane’s Mike Leber’s IPv6 deployment progress report (6), which is updated daily, provided another piece of the puzzle. When correlated to the IANA list, bingo, the culprits became visible, many obscure but a number of them rather out of place in this set. To refine the model, the title of Top Level Delinquent could be bestowed on the TLD with the largest number of domain names allocated under its ‘top’.

As ICANN and IANA can only do so much to enforce rules and regulations, an independent, up to date shame list, pillory of the cyber age, might help delinquents recognize themselves and also expose potential weak points in the internet. To give recognition to top performers on the other hand, why not create a TTLD honour roll for TLD’s who have 3 or more IPv6 authorities?

Oh yes, 9.6% of TLD’s still had open recursive name servers. Safe bet that some failed the grade in both the IPv6 and open recursivity categories oblivious of another Kaminsky type attack.

Progress is being made but to accelerate on the road of IP convergence and instill more confidence in the ‘public internet’, some additional discipline in the Domain Name area, starting with the top and working its way down, would certainly not hurt.

Yves Poppe
August 2009

1. http://www.isoc.org/isoc/conferences/inet/09/kualalumpur.shtml
2. http://www.icann.org/
3. http://www.iana.org/about/presentations/
4. http://www.icann.org/en/topics/new-gtlds/comments-2-en.htm
5. http://data.iana.org/TLD/tlds-alpha-by-domain.txt
6. http://bgp.he.net/ipv6-progress-report.cgi

Asia Regional Conference organized by the Internet Society (ISOC) in collaboration with the Asia Pacific IPv6 Task Force and the National Advanced IPv6 Centre of Excellence just concluded in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia on the 20th of July 2009.

The key messages that came out of this event were

1. IPv6 is not the next generation technology but the current technology
2. There is no killer application for IPv6, the internet is the killer application
3. IPv6 Business Case – if you want to stay in business start enabling dualstack networks

More information about the conference is at:
http://www.isoc.org/isoc/conferences/inet/09/kualalumpur.shtml

Julian Vincent

Well it’s official, our new company gogo6 is up and running!  In a deal that took six long months to complete, gogo6 is taking over from where Hexago left off.  You’ve probably heard the saying, “it’s a marathon, not a sprint.” Well in the case of IPv6 it’s a long distance relay race, not a marathon.

When Hexago was founded it was believed the migration to v6 was only a few years away.  It was believed that the path there was v4 -> dual stack -> v6.  But when the network engineers lost their drawn out battle with the bean counters, migration elegance was forever lost to practical coexistence and the tenets upon which Hexago was built needed to change – to be broadened.

So the baton is now passed to gogo6.  A fresh company with a new point of view, where everything we do is about solving the hard problems around creating v6 interoperability in a world running low on v4.  Besides expanding our product line, expect us to tighten up the go6 community so everyone involved can benefit from each other’s experience in their pursuit of v6.

Now that the buyout from management is complete, we are starting up with the energy, vision and experience necessary to cross the v6 finish line.  Hope to see you there.

Bruce Sinclair, gogo6 CEO
bruce@gogo6.com

Who would dare to predict the year the internet will reach 50 billion addressable devices?

Thomas Noren, head of LTE product development at Ericsson sees (1) one day 50 billion devices shouldered by LTE.  He sees LTE as the truly global standard putting to rest the long and acrimonious rivalry between CDMA and GSM protagonists and even sees the Chinese third way with their TD-SCDMA aligned on LTE.  Mobile Wimax is, in his mind, already relegated to the dustbin of history.

But whether or not it will all be riding on LTE, the 50 billion mark for addressable devices will be reached sooner rather than later.  It goes without saying that to realize this vision, LTE needs IPv6. It was reassuring to see Verizon confirm (2) their support for IPv6 and it would be great to see the other early movers such as our Canadian trio Bell, Rogers and Telus, our Nordic friends Teliasonera, Tele2 and Telenor not to forget our Japanese friends NTT Docomo and KDDI also voice their commitment.  IPv6 is a minor aspect in the big LTE scheme of things but is essential for its  success as a truly global and pervasive means of communications.

While some of the world’s leading LTE proponents and experts exchange notes at world summits (3)  and the WiMax Forum has very interesting  summits (4) of its own, other parts of the ecosystem are also conspiring to reach the 50 billion device milestone sooner rather than later. Foremost amongst them is the IPSO Alliance (5), their mission as indicated by the acronym is to make sure small objects with embedded IP can communicate between each other and those of other suppliers. The Alliance organized an interoperability demo at the Interop in Las Vegas in May. Sensors from a variety of suppliers located on three continents, all addressable in IPv6, supplied over 100,000 readings on temperature, humidity etc.  As stated in the press release (6)   ” Each node in the demonstration communicated using IPv6 directly between the sensor nodes without the use of proprietary protocols, gateways or translators”.  It is easy to overlook the magnitude of this news and to what extend the gates to the true emergence and growth of the internet of things have been opened by this initiative.

It is safe to bet it will not take a decade to see 50 billion addressable things on the internet.  These things are obviously devices as the Webster tells us that device (7) means amongst other things :  ‘a piece of equipment or a mechanism designed to serve a special purpose or perform a special function’.

As to whether all these device things will talk via LTE,  that remains to be seen;  what is sure though is that they’ll talk IPv6.

Yves Poppe
July 2009

1. http://cde.cerosmedia.com/1U4a01afaaa3ac1342.cde
2. http://www.circleid.com/posts/20090609_verizon_mandates_ipv6_support_for_next_gen_cell_phones/
3. http://ws.lteconference.com/
4. http://www.wimaxforum.org/wimaxevents
5. http://www.ipso-alliance.org/Pages/Front.php
6. http://www.ipso-alliance.org/Pages/PressRelease.php?cmd=view&sub=05_IPSO%20Alliance%20Conducts%20Successful%20Global%20Demonstration%20of%20IP-Enabled%20Smart%20Objects%20at%20Networld-Interop%202009_06.18.2009.html
7. http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/device