Four billion reasons to change

As any billionaire will tell you, four billion isn't enough. Four billion is the number of addresses possible under the internet numbering system in use for the past 20 years, and those addresses will run out by 2012 at the latest.

That means the world needs to shift to a new numbering system, Internet Protocol version 6, in an orderly fashion.

While IPv4 allowed only 32 bits for IP address space, IPv6 offers 128 bits. That translates to 340282366920938 463463374607431768211456, or three hundred forty undecillion possible nodes.

In Auckland and Wellington last month, hui were held to bring chief information officers at the country's largest public and private sector organisations up to speed.

The draw was Vint Cerf, known as the father of the internet for his work taking the idea of universal networking out of the research labs and into the wider public space.

Cerf warned that IPv6 adoption was behind schedule, given that the standards were adopted in 1996.

"The software is already available for clients and servers and routers but ISPs have not implemented or interconnected using this new protocol. We really need to accelerate that implementation," he told the hui.

Running multiple standards means commands need to be translated as they pass around the internet. It's a fuss, but not a major one _ there's no Y2K style incompatibility predicted, and it's unlikely to create a split internet.
``I suspect there will be a greater diversity of hosts in the future: IPv4-only, IPv6-only, and dual-stack hosts all [ideally] talking to one another [within the limitations of translation]," Cerf says.

"Eventually the cost of maintaining IPv4 infrastructure will exceed the value derived from it, since more customers will be forced on to IPv6 and it will be phased out. Like rotary phone dialling, however, it will probably take decades."

He says that while internet service providers will ultimately be the ones who make IPv6 happen, it's not something they can charge for - and until recently major software and equipment sellers have charged extra for IPv6 capability.

But it is content and applications that drive consumer behaviour, and there is not a lot of either on the IPv6 parts of the internet.

Former Telecom chief technical officer Murray Milner, who chaired the hui, says what's likely to drive IPv6 adoption is the next generation of mobile devices, LTE or long-term evolution, known as 4G.

"There will be a point in time for CIOs in the next couple of years where their CEO says, 'I want this new device I've got to work with the company system,' and if all the networks and applications aren't IPv6, they can't do it," Milner says.

Unlike Y2K, there is no single date organisations need to work to. Every network will have a different day in which the lack of IPv6 capability becomes a problem, such as when a device doesn't work, or they can't connect with a customer or supplier.

Corporates have not noticed the impending shortage of internet addresses because their networks have a private address range within the firewall which they reuse.

That sort of nesting causes problems, such as when they share applications with other networks which may have the same address range, but the real problems come when they want to do business with places which have moved systems to IPv6, as is happening in large parts of Asia.

"Once you go IPv6, there is no backwards capacity," Milner says.
That means building translation services into the network, which are never perfect.

Milner says translators and dual stacks, running IPv4 and IPv6 in parallel, will allow people to make a "gracious transition."

There is no need to rip out what's there, which would mean unnecessary expense. "The impetus is to make sure you do plan that as you hit the end of life of equipment, you want to upgrade and not milk more out of it once it's depreciated on the books," he says.

"If you do a managed roadmap, train your networking people, get the right relationships, it should be a painless process and most people who have done it in a managed way found it has not caused problems or disruptions to the business."

Milner says most network hardware and software is now IPv6 enabled, and it's just a matter of clicking the box when it's installed.

Linux is IPv6 compatible, and most web servers are based on Linux. Windows Vista 7 and XP are also compatible.

Security is mandatory rather than optional, and IPv6 allows for better engineering of network traffic.

Milner says a measure of the success of the hui was that at 5.15pm he still had 77 people in the room asking the panel questions.

"There was also one CIO who stood up and said 'when I came here this morning I was sceptical, but I'm going away knowing I have a lot of work to do in my organisation.'"

ON THE WEB

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