The 6bone phaseout day (06/06/06) came and went last week. It does seem to have had some impact. From one site, my route to KAME went through Sprint’s 6bone space at two points. Later in the week, one of the routers had been renumbered, and by today I don’t see any 6bone addresses in the list.
This did bring a vaguely interesting point to mind. If someone that you get transit from uses 6bone addresses and you drop packets to/from 6bone addresses, then you can break things like traceroute and PMTU discovery, because they depend on getting packets from intermediate hosts. Though, people offering you transit probably shouldn’t really be using 6bone space any more. (The Ghost Route Hunter guys are monitoring who is still using 6bone space.)
The use of ip6.int also faded further - the RIRs have deleted their deligations in the ip6.int tree. Unfortunately, for people with hosts that use ip6.int, one of the servers for ip6.int has a 6bone address, which is now unreachable from chunks of the IPv6 Internet.
I missed what looks like quite an interesting talk by Mike Warfield at the TERENA on the security implications of IPv6. For me, one of the most interesting points is that if you don’t block IPv6 in your network then it will creep in because of users or attackers making use of it.
This is very similar to a point we included in a report on WiFi in Dublin 2002: IT departments will have to provide WiFi ‘cos if they don’t users will just plug in access points. I’ve seen this proven true in several situations since and so I still think it is good advice.
Mike Warfield goes one step further though. He points out that providing IPv6 is a lot easier than blocking it because there are so many ways to get IPv6 connectivity, thus the best path for IT providers is to start providing IPv6 connectivity that they can at least monitor and control.
(You can get the slides on the TERENA site. They may make the webcast available later.)
Yesterday was Irish Budget day. Recently HEAnet started streaming sessions of the Oireachtas (the Irish parliament and sennate) over IPv4 and IPv6, so I got to listen to my first budget over IPv6!
Hi there, and welcome to the “IPv6 Network Administration” blog.
Niall