No worries
There's no reason to trouble yourself with an IPv6 upgrade yet, though you may want to jot it down in your five-year planner.
By Neal Weinberg
Network World, 09/21/98
If you're a network manager, you're probably up nights worrying about a number of things, from RMON2 to SAP R/3 to IMAP4 to NetWare 5. But one thing you don't have to fret about yet is IPv6.
Thanks to some effective stopgap measures, it turns out that the world won't be running out of IP addresses any time soon. This means there's no reason to rush to implement IPv6, the next-generation Internet protocol that expands address space from 32 bits to 128 bits.
While no one knows for sure when the current supply of IP addresses will dry up, you probably won't need to pencil an IPv6 upgrade onto your calendar for a good five years.
In the meantime, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) will continue to define IPv6 standards, vendors will begin to deliver products that support the protocol, and early adopters will run trials on a test bed known as the 6Bone.
More importantly, Microsoft will develop an IPv6 stack for the version of Windows NT that follows 5.0. Users won't migrate to IPv6 until Microsoft delivers it to the desktop, and that probably won't occur for another three or four years, according to Bob Fink, network researcher for the federal Energy Sciences network project (ESnet) in Berkeley, Calif., and a key member of the IPv6 planning group.
"There's lots of life under the current mode of operation," says Fink, a 26-year veteran of Internet projects. "But it's a good thing somebody's working on it because five years out we darn well better be starting to do something and 10 years out it better be working very well, or else we'll have a problem.''
IETF Chair Fred Baker says there's no reason for a company to go through the pain of an upgrade until its business is being hurt by the lack of new addresses or until existing tools to extend IPv4 begin to lose their effectiveness.
Baker points out that technologies such as Network Address Translation (NAT), Dynamic Host Control Protocol (DHCP) and Classless Interdomain Routing have allowed companies to hide millions of internal addresses behind a small number of public addresses and to better manage those addresses under IPv4.
But those workarounds haven't addressed all of IPv4's shortcomings, and IPv6 working group member Thomas Narten says the new protocol may be needed sooner than many people think, especially if demand for IP convergence intensifies.
Narten points out that IPSec, the IETF's protocol for IP security, doesn't work through a NAT server, which means the IPv4/NAT solution may not satisfy people's concerns about Internet security. "This may be a huge barrier for widespread deployment of voice over IP,'' Narten says.
He also argues that IPv6 provides fundamentally better quality of service (QoS) than a combination of IPv4 and Resource Reservation Protocol (RSVP), which has been criticized for shortcomings in scalability and ease of deployment.
Furthermore, Narten says IPSec works by encrypting port numbers, which effectively negates RSVP's ability to classify traffic. However, IPv6 works smoothly with IPSec and doesn't need to look at port numbers. The protocol provides QoS by reading the flow label on the IPv6 header and identifying packets that come from the same flow.
No one can predict today how quickly IPv6 will take off, but Baker says it all rests on market forces. In other words, when customers yell loud enough, ISPs will be forced to upgrade their own systems and start offering it.
Robert Skarza, managing partner at DownCity, a small ISP based in Norwich, Conn., confirms that it's getting harder to squeeze new addresses out of his upstream provider, but the situation hasn't reached a crisis point yet.
Skarza says DownCity is taking a wait-and-see approach to IPv6. "Everyone agrees that sooner or later the numbers are going to run out. There are a bunch of guys working on it, and several years down the road when everybody needs it, hopefully it will be there,'' he says.
But it's too soon for network managers to even be thinking about IPv6, says Maribel Lopez, an analyst at Forrester Research in Cambridge, Mass. She says technologies such as NAT and DHCP are doing the trick, and when people complain about the shortage of addresses "it just means they can't get address blocks as big as they want.''
The situation will become critical only if devices such as cell phones suddenly need their own addresses to connect directly to the Internet, Lopez says. That may happen sometime, but she doesn't expect to see users looking seriously at IPv6 until around 2003. "I don't see anything pushing IPv6 now; there's no need for it," Lopez says.
Migrating to IPv6 will require a major effort because virtually everything on the network - routers, printers, operating systems, applications, even the NATs - needs to be upgraded to support IPv6.
However, the IPv6 planning group's Fink says the IETF is going to great lengths to assure a smooth migration. He envisions a slow transition in which routers and other devices run dual IPv4/IPv6, which allows network managers to methodically turn on IPv6 features at their own paces. In addition, IPv6-enabled operating systems will automatically configure an IPv6 address and IPv4 address upon installation, giving network managers a choice of protocols.
In the near term, the IETF is in the process of voting on elevating IPv6 to Draft Standard status and IPv6 addresses may become available by year-end. Vendors are at various stages of delivering IPv6; FTP Software and 3Com already have IPv6 implementations shipping; Compaq's Digital unit, Nokia and others have prototypes out; and other major players such as Cisco and Sun plan to deliver IPv6 soon.
Although customers aren't clamoring for IPv6 products just yet, vendors are confident it's just a matter of time and they want to be ready for early adopters.
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Contact Features Reporter Neal Weinberg
Listen to a five-minute discussion of the technology.
IPv6 working group
The group that came up with the protocol. Page includes relevant RFCs and papers, an overview of the transition mechanism and a guide to current implementations.
IPv6 FAQ
Includes an answer to that vexing question: What happened to IPv5?
Making the move: The path for an orderly transition from IPv4 to IPv6
Includes a transition checklist. Network World, 1/20/97.
IPv6 will change apps, servers
Changes you'll have to make as you move to IPv6. Network World, 6/23/97.
Address Assignment and Management in the IPv6 Environment
A very detailed look at changes in the address space.
IPv6 Key Management
A similarly detailed look at security in IPv6.
6Bone
Home page for an IPv6 testbed network.
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