* Informational guide from Juniper: "IPv6 Capable: A Guide for Federal Agencies"
With U.S. federal government agencies facing a looming deadline to migrate to IPv6, router manufacturer Juniper Networks recently published an informational guide on this pending upgrade to the Internet’s main protocol.
“IPv6 Capable: A Guide for Federal Agencies” was published in May. It is 83 pages long, and it provides a brief history of the Internet Protocol as well as an overview of addressing, routing, security and other features of IPv6.
The Office of Management and Budget requires all federal agencies to run IPv6 on their network backbones by June 2008. The Defense Department has a similar mandate for all military networks to migrate to IPv6 by FY 2008.
IPv6 is a long-anticipated upgrade to the Internet’s main communications protocol, which is known as IPv4. Developed by the IETF, IPv6 promises easier administration, tighter security and an enhanced addressing scheme over IPv4. IPv6, which uses a 128-bit addressing scheme, supports a virtually limitless number of uniquely identified systems on the ‘Net, while IPv4 supports only a few billion systems because it uses a 32-bit addressing scheme.
Juniper’s IPv6 guide is a good read for upper-level network executives and project managers who want to understand IPv6 and related terms such as dual-stack, tunneling and translation. It also explains the standardization process at the IETF, which developed IPv6 and related communications protocols.
However, Juniper’s IPv6 guide doesn’t provide real-world case studies or lessons learned from organizations that have migrated to IPv6. Readers will find it useful for explaining IPv6-related terminology, but they won’t get much guidance in terms of planning or executing a network migration to IPv6.
A summary of Juniper’s IPv6 guide can be downloaded here.
The most interesting fact that I found in Juniper’s IPv6 guide was what happened to IPv5. (This is a question my editor has asked me a dozen times, and one I could never answer.)
Here’s what Juniper’s guide says about IPv5:
“In the late 1970s, a protocol named The Internet Stream (ST) Protocol was created for the experimental transmission of voice, video and distributed simulation. Two decades later, this protocol was revised to become ST2 (RFC 1819) and started to be implemented in commercial projects by organizations like IBM, NeXT, Apple and Sun. ST2 offered connection-based communications instead of the connection-less communications paradigm of TCP/IP, which provided guaranteed QoS. ST was assigned Version 5 of the Internet protocol (IPv5).”
