Erion are running a public IPv6 training course in Washington DC, USA. The course is Erion’s flagship 4 day Implementing IPv6. The date is 9th December 2008. Further information can be found on Erion’s IPv6 training site at http://www.ipv6training.com/IPv6Courses/trainingschedule.html.
Scotland/Luxembourg, July 14th, 2008 - The IPv6 Forum welcomes Scotland as its newest member with the establishment of IPv6 Task Force Scotland under the leadership of Dr. David Holder, Chair, IPv6 Task Force Scotland.
The prime objective of the IPv6 Task Force and its members is to promote deployment and swifter uptake of the new Internet using the new Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) with support from industry, education, research communities and government agencies enabling equitable access to technology and knowledge,
“The IPv6 Task Force Scotland will try to win key Scottish stakeholders to design an IPv6 Roadmap and create momentum in deploying IPv6 in view of the call of the EU to swiftly adopt IPv6 by 2010″ said Mr. Latif Ladid, IPv6 Forum President.
“The Scottish IPv6 Task Force has very good access to key players from government, industry and academia to coordinate an action plan in view of the imminent integration of IPv6 and deployment in Scotland ” said Dr. David Holder, Chair, IPv6 Task Force Scotland.
The Internet World has been using the Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4) for the last two decades. Despite its tremendous success, IPv4 is showing signs of strain especially in its fast depleting IP address space and its growing security concerns. IPv6 preserves everything good in today’s Internet, and adds much more, such as virtually unlimited IP address space to connect everyone and everything, stateless auto-configuration, seamless mobility, mandated security and new optional service levels.
About the IPv6 Task Force Scotland
The IPv6 Task Force Scotland is a chapter of the IPv6 Forum dedicated to the advancement and propagation of IPv6 in Scotland. Its mission is to provide technical leadership and innovative thought for the successful integration of IPv6 into all facets of networking and telecommunications infrastructure, present and future.
Please visit http://www.ipv6taskforce-scotland.org.uk
About the IPv6 Forum
The IPv6 Forum is a world-wide consortium of international Internet service providers (ISPs) and National Research & Education Networks (NRENs), with a mission to promote IPv6 by improving market and user awareness, creating a quality and secure New Generation Internet and allowing world-wide equitable access to knowledge and technology. The key focus of the IPv6 Forum today is to provide technical guidance for the deployment of IPv6. IPv6 Summits are organized by the IPv6 Forum and staged in various locations around the world to provide industry and market with the best available information on this rapidly advancing technology.
Please visit http://www.ipv6forum.com
European IPv6 task Force: www.ipv6.eu
European Commission IPv6 Communication:
http://ec.europa.eu/information_society/newsroom/cf/itemdetail.cfm?item_id=4133
Organization Contact:
Dr. David Holder
Chair, IPv6 Task Force Scotland
Direct Dial: +44 (0)131 2026317
david.holder@erion.co.uk
IPv6 Forum Contact:
Latif Ladid
Luxembourg
+352 30 71 34
Latif.ladid@ipv6forum.com
Samba 3.2 was released today (1st July 2008). Samba 3.2 is the first production version of the popular open source Windows integration product to fully support IPv6.
Erion was instrumental in the development of an IPv6 enabled version of Samba. Erion’s David Holder carried out a number of firsts with the development version of Samba 3.2, including the first ever join of Samba to a Windows Server 2008 Active Directory domain over IPv6.
Further information on Erion’s involvement with Samba and IPv6 can be found in the these blog posts.
The Global IPv6 Summit took place on the 18th and 19th June 2008 in Seoul, Korea. Erion’s David Holder attended and presented a paper entitled IPv6 Enabling Unix-Linux and Windows Integration.
The conference took place at the same time (and venue) as the meeting of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). The OECD released a declaration encouraging the deployment of IPv6 to ensure the continued growth of the Internet as IPv4 addresses run out.
There were two major points made by many of the speakers at the conference:
The ministerial meeting of the Organization for Economic Growth and Development (OCED), held last week in Seoul, issued a declaration expressing their support for the deployment of IPv6.
Representatives from the Regional Internet Registries (RIRs) and leading Internet personalities such as Vint Cerf argued that a quick adoption of IPv6 is essential as IPv4 addresses run out.
The IPv4 address pool is expected to run out by , at the latest, 2011 and may well be completely depleted by 2009. The declaration calls on large users of IPv4 addresses to lead the way in migrating to IPv6.
We have just added two IPv6 courses to our 2008 public training schedule. The two courses are our Implementing IPv6 and our Securing IPv6 courses. Both will run in Basingstoke, UK (near London). Futher details can be found on Erion’s IPv6 training schedule page.
On the 30th May 2008 the European Commission held an IPv6 day in Brussels. The event gathered together key people involved in IPv6 from the European Commission and IPv6 stakeholders from around the world.
The motto of the event was “IPv6, the way forward, do it now!” A number of speakers referred to the misconception that IPv6 is still under development. A wealth of examples from around the world emphasises the fact that IPv6 is indeed ready for deployment now.
Based on the current usage of IPv4 adddresses it is expected that the IPv4 address pools will be exhausted somewhere between 2010 and 2012.
Over a number of years the European Commission has funded a variety of projects relating to IPv6. In addition, the EC has mandated that all EC projects utilising networking technologies must include IPv6. Now, the EC has moved from research and development in IPv6 to supporting the deployment of IPv6.
During the day many examples were given to illustrate the urgency of implementing IPv6. The fundamental problem is the depletion of the IPv4 address space. At the current rate of IPv6 address allocation the IPv4 address pools (managed by IANA and regional registries such as RIPE) will have been used up. This means that registrars will no longer be able to allocate addresses to ISPs or other organisations.
Whilst it is impossible to predict exactly how Internet users will deal with an address famine there is no doubt that the exhaustion of the IPv4 address space will hinder the growth of the Internet and stifle technology innovation.
The presentations from the day included, a video message from Vint Cerf, reports from EC projects, presentations from companies and organisations from around the world. Here are some highlights:
Empires of the Mind
In the inaugural session, Dr. Žiga Turk gave a brief review of the rise and fall of empires and how this was based on the success and failure of communication systems. He went on to show how science and engineering and specifically civil engineering, progressed with improvements in communication. This entertaining and interesting talk strongly illustrated the importance of communication systems to the development of society as a whole.
Finally, after describing many of the benefits we have seen with the growth in the Internet, he asked the question, “do you really want this to end, because we are running out of IP numbers”.
The Biggest IPv6 Implementation in the World
During the Keynote session, Mr. Lui Dong from BII China, gave a talk on “New Olympics, New Internet Economy and New Opportunities”. Only a few years ago China has very few Internet users, in Mr Dong’s presentation he showed how China’s Internet is now outstripping most other countries.
Due to historic low Internet use China has a very small proportion of the world’s IPv4 address space. At the same time it has the largest growth in IP address usage. Therefore, the Chinese government has actively supported the development and deployment of IPv6. There are over one hundred IPv6 projects supported by the government.
China now has the world’s biggest IPv6 supported single-domain backbone. This is the biggest IPv6 production network in the world.
The 2008 Olympics make widespread use of IPv6. The Olympic park network is a dual stack network. Many key applications are IPv6 enabled. These include the Olympic surveillance network and even lighting control in the Olympic stadiums!
IPv6 Makes New Applications Possible
Mr. Esaki of TF Japan presented his talk by video link from Japan. An very interesting aspect of his talk was how IPv6 made possible previously unimagined applications.
For example, large number of addresses provided by IPv6 made it possible to network many sensors in a car. As a result, the data from the car sensors became available to application developers allowing them to be used in innovative ways. He gave two examples, rain detection and traffic detection. Information on the speed of the windscreen wipers was used to indicate how heavy rain was in a particular area. This data was collated from a number of cars allowing a map of rain density to be created. Further data was collated from the Automatic Braking System (ABS) and used to indicate traffic density. Prior to IPv6 this data was not available and so no one had thought of how it could be used.
Mr. Christman of NTT further illustrated this with the example of an earthquake monitor. Monitors places in schools, homes and other buildings used IPv6 to send an alert when movement was detected. Using a knowledge of the location of the individual monitors a map of the earthquakes progress could be built up. The monitor could then alert people to the arriving tremor, giving them just enough time to find shelter.
Enterprise Applications IPv6 Ready
One area that has been a reason not to migrate to IPv6 has been the lack of support for IPv6 in enterprise applications. This is less so today. Mr. Lutz Heuser of SAP spoke about how SAP’s applications are fully IPv6 ready. It was interesting to note how easy SAP had found migrating their applications to IPv6.
In conclusion, the EU IPv6 day showed how far IPv6 has progressed in the last ten years. There is no doubt that the urgency for the deployment of IPv6 has increased and that it is now increasingly easy to deploy IPv6.
Further Information
Further information on the IPv6 day can be found at http://ec.europa.eu/information_society/policy/ipv6/events/presentations/index_en.htm.
At lot can happen in a year. This is certainly true of IPv6 and Samba. In this article, I summarise the progress made in IPv6 enabling Samba and review the current status of Samba and IPv6 support. Further details can be found in my presentation Configuring Samba 3/4 for IPv6 Operation with Windows Server 2008 and Windows Vista.
Last year in my presentation at SambaXP 2007 (see SambaXP IPv6 Presentation) I showed how important it was that Samba catch up with Microsoft Windows in supporting IPv6. Microsoft’s latest operating systems, Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 (then codenamed Longhorn) are IPv6 enabled by default. The increasing drive to implement IPv6 in various parts of the world meant that Samba risked being kept out of, or dropped from, environments where IPv6 is required.
Since then a lot has changed. Here are some highlights from the last twelve months:
Erion is proud to have carried out each of these firsts and being involved with Jermey Allison in IPv6 enabling Samba 3.2.
Linux CIFS Client
The Linux CIFS client has full support for IPv6 in the Linux kernel. This kernel is now widely available in the latest releases of many Linux distributions. At present, the mount command mount.cifs does not support IPv6 name resolution and the IPv6 address must be specified using a mount option. However, my patch to mount.cifs enables IPv6 name resolution. During Samba XP, I worked with Steve French and Jelmer Vernooij to improve support for IPv6 in mount.cifs. Friday evening found Jelmer still working on rewriting mount.cifs to include IPv6 support.
Samba 3.2
As Samba 3.2 nears a production release, it has been fully IPv6 enabled. This was a result of my presentation at CIFS Engineering Workshop held at Google last year. Erion has carried out the IPv6 testing for Samba 3.2. This has gone well and very few bugs have been found. During SambaXP Jeremy Allison put in time to investigate and resolve IPv6 bugs in Samba 3.2. Further information on IPv6 enabling Samba 3.2 can be found in our presentations from the Google IPv6 Conference earlier this year.
Samba 4
Support for IPv6 in Samba 4 still relies on my hack (a new version of which can be found here). The interest in IPv6 shown by the Samba team is illustrated by the time I spent with Andrew Tridgell. Andrew was very keen to incorporate my patch into the standard build of Samba 4. This would mean that, where possible, Samba 4 would build with IPv6 support as standard. The work was not completed by the end of SambaXP, but I will be chasing Andrew to complete it over the next few weeks.
In conclusion, SambaXP 2008 was a very positive event for IPv6 support in Samba. Much work still has to be done, but in the very near future there will be a solution for those who wish to upgrade Samba 3.0 to Samba 3.2 in order to get IPv6 support. So far most of the IPv6 testing of Samba has been undertaken by Erion. I would be very interested to hear of anyone else who is testing or even using Samba over IPv6 in live environments. During the conference Jelmer migrated his use of the Linux CIFS client in his home network to operate over IPv6! Now for the rest of the world…
The Linux CIFS client has had kernel support for IPv6 since early 2007. Up until now it has been necessary to specify an IPv6 address with the ip option. IPv6 name resolution was not supported. A new patch from Erion’s David Holder provides IPv6 name resolution in the mount.cifs command.
The mount.cifs patch can be found at IPv6 Name Resolution Patch for Linux CIFS Client.
In February 2008, IPv6 addresses were added for six of the world’s 13 root name servers. Now many country code top level domains (ccTLDs) also have IPv6 addresses.
This is a significant step for the widespread deployment of IPv6. Organisations can now, potentially, use only IPv6 for name resolution.
Erion has provided IPv6 consultancy and training to enable ccTLDs to IPv6 enable their domain name services. We have provided a mixture of advanced IPv6 deployment training, IPv6 security training, IPv6 implementation consultancy and IPv6 security consultancy.
Please contact us for further details.
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