Peter's Griddle

IPv6 traffic as a percentage of total traffic at isc.sans.org almost tripled from 0.5% to 1.3% of all users of the website.

Isc.sans.org is a security institute. The report analyses the provenance of this traffic (lots of tunnels!) and the security implications of this.

Labels: ipv6

According to WatchMouse, around 40% of the hosters they do business with will support IPv6 native within 6 months, up from almost 0 two years ago. See the full story

Labels: ipv6

The Dutch IPv6 taskforce is running a contest for best contribution to IPv6.

29 submissions have been received for 6 categories. There are some interesting contestants, amongst them WatchMouse, on which I reported earlier.

See the full press release (in dutch).

Labels: ipv6

Slowly, but steadily, we see progress on the IPv6 front.

Finally, I found a reasonable provider of Virtual Private Server hosting with native IPv6 access (XLS Hosting). Still a few minor issues, but no showstoppers. I have moved a nummber of websites, including this blog to it.
So far very few hits (grep "^2...:" /var/www/vhosts/*/statistics/logs/access_log) but that may change after this post :-)

In addition, my friends over at www.watchmouse.com have updated their website monitoring service with IPv6 support. This will allow you to check the proper operation of an IPv6 website, for example.
They also upgraded two of their public tools: Checkit and Ping.

My own work is often about improving the quality of digital infrastructures, and I find tools like these indispensable. It has taken me some effort to convince Watchmouse to adopt IPv6, and it pleases me to see that they finally did it. IPv6 needs tools like these.

They would really appreciate your feedback on the service. For IPv6 adopters a trial package is available. This enables you to check a number of websites.

The trial package is free for 30 days. No credit card required, no strings attached. If you have trouble registering, e.g. because a trial was already used with an email address on your domain, just email me, and I'll arrange a trial account for you.

If you send them feedback, consider sharing it with me as well.

Your trial can be set up at the Watchmouse site. If you use this link, they'll give me some respect!

Labels: ipv6

A couple of weeks ago, I organised a workshop on IPv6 at Hacking at Random.
The on-site network had native IPv6 and sflow monitoring, so we could see what was going on.

The workshop ran from 10:00 to 11:00 GMT on saturday.

As you can see from the graph, IPv6 traffic increased sharply after the workshop. So I guess education helps.

Labels: ipv6

In August I will be visiting HAR2009. My focus will be on setting up IPv6 stuff. In the works is a 'Village' for that. See the wiki. If you are going, or are interested in IPv6, please contribute.

Labels: ipv6

The world is running out of IPv4 Internet addresses, which is why we should work on the deployment of IPv6. Or so the reasoning goes. The address space exhaustion is well documented and real, see also my earlier post.


But how much of these addresses are really in use, and how do countries differ in that respect? Is there any chance we can recycle a lot of unused addresses? It would be interesting to see how much of the space allocated to a country is actually used.

I got some very interesting data from Akamai, whose content distribution network delivers 10-20% of all web traffic. (They do a lot of the traffic of MySpace and Logitech, for example). Akamai kindly provided me with a list of the total number of unique IP addresses that they actually see in use, per country. By comparing this with the number of allocated IP addresses, we can get a feel for the efficiency with which these addresses are used. The table shows the address utilization for all countries with more than 10 million allocated IP addresses.

The worst performers outside of this group are typically very small and/or poor countries.

The best performer above 1 million allocated addresses is Turkey with 42% utilization. There are better performers but they are pretty small, which reduces the accuracy with which we know their data. The full data is visualized in the following heatmap.

One methodological note to make is that Akamai can only see IP addresses in use by real users. This excludes addresses that are used by machines such as routers, servers, and camera’s etcetera. A further assumption is that Akamai sees most of the active Internet users. Actually for all the relevant countries Akamai sees over half of active users. We’ll assume that this does not bias any specific country.

More than half the countries have better than 17% utilization. Well developed countries typically have higher utilization rates, with the exception of the United States (7.1%). The global average is 12,8% utilization.

So, are we running out of IPv4 addresses? Geoff Huston expects IPv4 addresses to be depleted at the RIR level around 2011. This is an extrapolation of current practices, which may or may not be optimal. Our analysis here shows that it is pretty hard to get higher than 30-40% utilization. At these utilization rates, there is in the end only 1 IP address for every 5-6 world inhabitants, even though the Internet can then grow to 3 times its current size. At today’s growth rates of active internet penetration (20% ?) our current address allocation model will be exhausted in around 6 years (around 2014). This is true even if the US starts selling off its surplus of IP addresses to the market.

For an interesting additional perspective on the relation between users and IP adresses, have a look at Comcast: the myth of static IP

Labels: ipv6

As of this week, the IPv6 Internet is a reality.
IPv6-only devices can now access the Internet.
The Internet root name servers are now IPv6 enabled. This is a small but significant step on the road to the next generation Internet.

Labels: ipv6

IPv6 is the new version of the current Internet protocol IPv4. I wrote about that earlier.

As a follow up I was asked to write a report on practical implementations of IPv6.
It describes how organisations got started on using IPv6 and where it will be deployed first.

This report is now translated in English. You can get a copy if you mail any message to the autoresponder at ipv6@getreponse.com (opt-in required).

Labels: ipv6