IPv6 At ICANN Paris

Image via Wikipedia

(ICANN meeting Lisbon, 2007)
I will be heading over to the ICANN meeting in Paris next week. At present ICANN holds international meetings three times a year and it’s a very good opportunity to get involved with the discussions of policy and future development of the internet.
While I am looking forward to the trip, I’m also quite nervous, as I have been asked to give a presentation on IPv6 to a group of industry peers.
Here at Blacknight, as we keep telling people, we’ve been investing heavily in network equipment. In simple terms we’ve been doing our utmost to ensure that not only do you never have to suffer the pain of an outage, but also to make sure that any sites or servers hosted by us have excellent connectivity to the outside world.
One of the areas that is of concern to a lot of people in our industry is the depletion of ipv4 space.
(I can practically hear people yawning at this point!)
Basically any device, be that a pc, phone, tablet or whatever that wants to connect to the internet needs an IP address. Back when Vint Cerf et al were coming up with the internet they had no way of knowing how big it would grow or how their addressing system would be expected to cater for so many users for such a long time. The end result – the current system of allocating IP addresses means there is a finite number of them available and that number is getting smaller every single day.
Our CTO Paul posted about our plans to bring IPv6 to everyone last year.
Of course it hasn’t happened yet, but we weren’t expecting it to happen overnight.
As I mentioned in a recent interview with ENN, it’s a bit of a “chicken and egg” situation.
With that in mind we’ve been working on rolling out ipv6 to as many areas as possible.
Some of our company sites are accessible over IPv6, such as www.blacknight.ie – but not www.blacknight.com, as we’re waiting to upgrade some backend software to support the necessary DNS records. I’m a strong believer in “eating my own dog food”, so I’ve enabled IPv6 on my personal servers so that you can now access several blogs and other sites over ipv6 or ipv4.
We’re also in the process of enabling IPv6 on our nameservers, so that not only would we be able to server AAAA (ipv6) records, but the nameservers themselves will be accessible over IPv6.
Unfortunately not all hosting providers and ISPs are offering native IPv6 on their networks, so we have to do some jiggery pokery to get it all working on our partner networks (we run dns in three countries for extra redundancy)