By David Meyer, 18 June 2007 09:25
NEWS
European businesses are being held back from migrating to IP version 6 due to the way IP addresses are being allocated, according to the director of IT at the UK internet registrar, Nominet.
IPv6 will succeed the current version, IPv4, and because it uses a longer string of numbers for identification it promises many more IP addresses than are possible in IPv4.
The American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN) argues that because only 19 per cent of IPv4 address space remains available - and it is running out faster than expected - it was, for the first time, "compelled to advise the internet community that migration to IPv6 is necessary for any applications that require ongoing availability of contiguous IP number resources".
Dave Passmore, research director at Burton Group, said: "This issue will significantly affect all enterprise organisations with applications that require the ongoing availability of public IP addresses."
However, concerns have been raised about the way IPv6 addresses are currently allocated by RIPE, the European equivalent of ARIN, and it appears that this situation will not change for at least four months.
Nominet's IT director Jay Daley indicated that, unlike ARIN, RIPE was allowing only ISPs access to IPv6 addresses, leaving enterprises out in the cold.
He said: "We, for example, have our own IPv4 address allocation from RIPE but we are unable to get an IPv6 allocation because their current allocation policy means we must be an ISP who gives addresses out to at least 200 customers. We don't give addresses to customers - we are an enterprise, in the same way that a large enterprise might want their own address space for local management of internet connectivity."
Tim Chown, systems administrator for the University of Southampton's school of electronics and computer science and a member of the UK's IPv6 taskforce, agreed. He said that although the bulk of the hardware and software needed for IPv6 was already available, companies were currently unable to avoid being tied to an ISP when migrating to IPv6.
David Meyer writes for ZDNet UK
Comments
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1. Simon
A lack of understanding ?
I am absolutely no expert in IP6, but I was under the impression that addresses are going to have a heirarchical structure as a way of minimising the routing table issues that affect the IP4 world.
As it was once explained to me ...
In effect there will be a relatively small number of top level aggregators with 'ownership' of the first few bits of their address space (I assume these will be the large 'clearing houses' like Linx in London). Underneath these will be another level who will have the first few bits from the parent plus some address bits of their own. This will continue down the chain until the end user/organisation gets a block of addresses where the prefix is formed by the chain by which it was reached.
If someone has connectivity from two (or more) different sources, then they will get two (or more) sets of IP6 addresses - and IP6 devices are designed from the ground up on the expectation of having several addresses.
As I interpret what I was told, the routing will be done at a higher level in the chain - with the IP address effectively forming part of the route (up the chain, across to a top level agregator, and down the other side). I imagine that there will be routing between agregators at the lext level, but this will be a LOT simpler than the fairly numerous small blocks currently handled by the worldwide routing tables.
All this also means that whenever someone changes service providers they will also change IP6 addresses - which is more or less the case now for anyone but the very biggest of users, ie all those forced to use addresses from their suppliers allocation. I don't see why this should be a big deal, after all, few people are going to memorise IP6 addresses, so it only requires proper management of DNS.
2. anonymous
This is the sole reason that IPv6 is not taking off.
Today's internet was so successful largely thanks to loose rules. Yes, the route table is huge compared to 1993 when I first started in this industry. Big deal.
Instead of these policies that say you can only get IPs from an ISP and dictate how you can multihome, users should be pressuring their router vendors to support more than a handful of IPv6 routes in the CAM space.
Eventually, these monarchaic rules will be lifted. Unfortunately, I fear that it will be too late and routers will require hardware upgrades for larger CAMs (fortunately for Cisco).