IPv6 at NCAR

8/28/2002

Overview

• What is IPv6?

• What’s wrong with IPv4?

• Features of IPv6

• IPv6 will soon be available at NCAR

• How to use IPv6

What is IPv6?

• IPv6 is the next generation of the Internet Protocol.

• It will eventually replace IPv4, the protocol that we use today.

• IPv6 design started in 1993

• A standard was created in 1998.

What’s wrong with IPv4?

• Address exhaustion

• Routing tables getting too large

• Security

• Dynamic addresses are inconvenient

• Mobile IP not well supported

IPv4 Address Exhaustion

• 4 billion addresses, but not really

• CIDR helps, but not enough

• NAT helps, but not enough

• New smart devices will need network addresses

Routing Tables Too Big

• 110,000 routes today, and growing

• Need more memory

• Need more CPU

• Have to handle more routing changes

Dynamic Addressing is Inconvenient

• NAT is a band-aid– breaks some applications– debugging nightmare

• DHCP helps

• Static addresses are really nice

Mobile IPv4 isn’t good

• Hard to manage

• Clunky roaming

Features of IPv6

• 128-bit addresses• Hierarchical addressing• More efficient packet headers• Security• Auto configuration of end hosts• Anycast• Mobility• IPv6 co-exists with IPv4

128-bit addresses

• Sample IPv4 address:

127.117.8.203

• Sample IPv6 address: 3FFE:0000:0000:0001:0200:F8FF:Fe75:50DF

or 3FFE:0:0:1:200:F8FF:Fe75:50DF

or 3FFE::1:200:F8FF:Fe75:50DF

Security

• 56-bit DES is supported by all IPv6 stacks

• New extended packet headers allow various encryption algorithms

Autoconfiguration

IPv6 stateless autoconfiguration: the router and the host create an IPv6 address and a default route

IPv6 stateful autoconfiguration: uses DHCP like IPv4

Anycast

• IPv4 has unicast, broadcast, multicast

• IPv6 has no broadcast (uses multicast)

• But there’s the new anycast

• Sends a packet to the nearest of a set of hosts

• Like, “send this packet to the nearest router that has a connection to the Internet”

Mobility

• Mobile IPv4 exists in small deployments

• IPv6 has extended headers and Anycasting, which make Mobile IP easier

• Mobile IPv6 allows more efficient routing of packets to mobile nodes

NETS plans for IPv6 at NCAR

• FRGP now has native IPv6 to Abilene

• Establish native IPv6 from NCAR to FRGP

• Connect NCAR Juniper to a VLAN

• Experiment with IPv6 DNS

• Consider the security implications

• Offer IPv6 on production VLANs

• Consider an internal IPv6 routing protocol

How to use IPv6

• Ask NETS about enabling IPv6 on your network

• Get an operating system that supports IPv6

• Let the router assign your IPv6 addresses

• Use IPv6-aware applications to communicate with other IPv6 machines

Questions?