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.

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

The IPv6 killer application has finally been found, making sure Internet continues to run. The general consensus at Google’s IPv6 implementors conference was that the reason to deploy IPv6 is to ensure business continuity for your Internet services. The survival of the Internet is the killer app of IPv6 as one of the participants put it. The approach to achieve this is different from case to case. For ISPs the shortage of IPv4 addresses is the main decider in how the deployment of IPv6 will be done. Doing dual stack is not an option as it won’t save addresses, instead many operators are looking at different ways to rid themselves of IPv4 at same time as maintaining their IPv4 service to the end user. For content providers IPv6 deployment is way of keeping up with IPv6 rollout to ensure that users don’t run into problems by having to go through multiple NATs.

Now the question is when the Internet needs saving. There seems to be a common understanding that IPv6 will not be deployed in time to take care of the IPv4 shortage by its own existence. Instead it has to be used as a tool to extend the life of IPv4 services. This will become a reality within a next year or two when the ISPs will start to feel the pain of adding IPv4 customers in a traditional manner. At that point IPv6 will become an important part of the Internet even though a lot of users will continue to run IPv4 on their old Windows XP machines or PS3s.

Having IPv6 become a tool to keep the Internet running isn’t a bad thing, it is what IPv6 was created to do. The only thing that has changed is the way it is being done.

Registration is available at http://meetings.apnic.net/

Promotional video is available on YouTube ie. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LNJXn2h8-Y0

Having been following IPv6 at the IETF meetings for a couple of years it is clear that IPv6 now is back as a hot topic after having been dormant for a while. Just a year or so ago it seemed IPv6 was becoming an integrated part in daily routine and all the IPv6 specific work was done, but now it has changed. All the IPv6 related meetings are packed with people and there are plenty new things that have been brought to the table. It seems that the community has suddenly come to realise that there actually will be a need for interoperability solutions that allow operators to rid themselves of their IPv4 dependence. This is something that shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone, but still, here we are just two years from the end of IPv4 and work is more or less just starting on solutions to allow networks to run without IPv4. It seems reality has caught up with the purist who always envisioned the perfect migration to IPv6 where everybody moved to dual stack networks and eventually phased out IPv4 when it wasn’t needed any longer.
It is not only the interoperability that has renewed attention, it is IPv6 in general. The attention seems to be directed towards solving operational and deployment issues, which is a perfect sign that people finally are starting to think of how to actually run IPv6 networks and are starting to learn from what is already deployed. This shows that the larger community is starting to care about IPv6 and not just the IPv6 aficionados. Finally!

The Thailand IPv6 Summit will be held on the 15th until 17th December 2008, followed by an IPv6 workshop that will be held on the 18th to 19th December 2008.

The Thailand IPv6 Summit has agreed to host the MAIN APv6TF meeting on the 18th December 2008. All APv6TF members are encouraged to attend and fully support the Thailand IPv6 Summit. APv6TF would like to express its sincere thanks and gratitute to the Thai IPv6 Summit group for agreeing to host our meeting side-by-side with their mtgs.

The details on the IPv6 Summit Thailand & IPv6 Workshop can be accessed from the following links:

http://wiki.nectec.or.th/ntl/IPv6forum/IPv6Summit3

The details of the APv6TF meeting are as below:

Date: 18th December 2008
Venue: CAT Telecom Tower, 72 Charoen Krung Rd., Bangrak, Bangkok 10501,Thailand

Agenda:
9.30am-11.00am : Main APv6TF meeting and wrap up meeting for 2008
11.00am-12.00pm : Planning mtg for 2009 activities and meetings
12.00-1.30pm : Lunch
1.30pm – 3.30pm : Website SWG meeting
3.00-4.00pm : Wrap up meeting

Please confirm your attendance for the APv6TF meeting via email to (awina@nav6.org), cc Dr Sures (sures@nav6.org) so that arrangements can be made.