Well it’s official, our new company gogo6 is up and running!  In a deal that took six long months to complete, gogo6 is taking over from where Hexago left off.  You’ve probably heard the saying, “it’s a marathon, not a sprint.” Well in the case of IPv6 it’s a long distance relay race, not a marathon.

When Hexago was founded it was believed the migration to v6 was only a few years away.  It was believed that the path there was v4 -> dual stack -> v6.  But when the network engineers lost their drawn out battle with the bean counters, migration elegance was forever lost to practical coexistence and the tenets upon which Hexago was built needed to change – to be broadened.

So the baton is now passed to gogo6.  A fresh company with a new point of view, where everything we do is about solving the hard problems around creating v6 interoperability in a world running low on v4.  Besides expanding our product line, expect us to tighten up the go6 community so everyone involved can benefit from each other’s experience in their pursuit of v6.

Now that the buyout from management is complete, we are starting up with the energy, vision and experience necessary to cross the v6 finish line.  Hope to see you there.

Bruce Sinclair, gogo6 CEO
bruce@gogo6.com

The Hong Kong government, like many governments around the world, are currently considering their options for moving to IPv6.  The OGCIO’s first stop was to consult David Chung of Cyberport ( www.cyberport.hk ) to learn from their experience.  I met David two years ago when Cyberport launched one of the first IPv6 operating networks in Asia.  David is committed to having a state of the art network and has recently been giving back by becoming president of the IPv6 Forum Hong Kong.  In any case, the Hong Kong government has a backbone that they will convert to dual stack but doing a fork lift upgrade for all their department networks and services just isn’t financially practical at this time.  Faced with this reality the other transition mechanism of tunneling and translation must be considered.�
The OGCIO’s main goal is that the change is simple and safe.
With so many government users to manage, each with varying knowledge and support and different operating systems and applications, they want to be sure that the experience of going to v6 doesn’t cause a disruption in government activity.  To meet their end of year deadline they are considering a similar approach as Cyberport by using a tunneling solution but this means a client is required and that frightens them because clients requires user action and user action can result in extra support.  That being said, under consideration are: the software client (a customized version of the one you can download from the Freenet6 service on go6), Dongle6 or Dongle6 Enterprise (codename).  Dongle6 is plug ‘n’ play and provisions IPv6 for everyone/thing on the VLAN but with so many VLANs it may be easier to use the 1U Dongle6 Enterprise product which sits in the data center/machine room connecting a virtual Dongle6 to each VLAN in the network.
From a security point of view I gave them a whitepaper we wrote for the U.S. government called Introduction to Secure Managed Tunnels.  I’ll keep you posted on their decision. 

Bruce