The Next Net

I just got this link from Jordi Palet Martinez.

ISOC and The IPv6 Portal organize a half day IPv6 workshop in Istanbul, next Friday 28th, after the RIPE meeting.

The target audience is engineers, ICT managers, software developers and public sector. It is expected that the participants have some IPv4 knowledge in order to take bigger advantage of the workshop.

The goal of the workshop will be to introduce IPv6 from a theoretical point of view, and make some hands-on practices with Windows XP. Information about other operating systems will be also provided. The workshop will also give some basic ideas about how to enable IPv6 in ISP and enterprise networks. As a practical exercise, the participants will be able to present their own network cases and work on possible transition paths for those cases. It is expected that the participants bring their own laptops with XP SP2 to take further advantage of the hands-on part.

What is great about this initiative it that it addresses what matters most, ie how do you actually set up IPv6 in a real production environment. This is most welcome. The deployment of IPv6 has been slowed down by the fact that it still appears to be working in the lab only and not quite ready for mass deployment. From an IETF outsider’s point of view, it looks like they are still working on the specs. ‘IPv6 Test beds’ are being advertised. But again, most IT managers will consider that what is still at the test stage is not production ready.
On the software side, the lack of simple how-to documents and up to date configurations are also confusing users. As an example, there is no GUI in Windows XP to configure IPv6. You need to revert to obscure ‘netsh’ commands to make it work.
On a Linux Redhat 4 box, although you are offered to configure IPv6 at installation time, it does not define the default route. You end up with an unusable IPv6 config, unless you make the adjustments yourself.

(tip: ip -6 route add 2000::/3 via replace_this_with_your_ipv6_default_gateway).

In case you have not noticed, this blog is reachable through IPv6. Try ‘dig patrick.vande-walle.eu AAAA‘ (if you have a real operating system, of course )