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I wrote an article in May 2022, asking “Are we there yet?” about the transition to IPv6. At the time I concluded the article on an optimistic note, observing that we may not be ending the transition just yet, but we are closing in. I thought at the time that…
The topic of address plans for IPv6 has had a rich and varied history. From the very early concepts of “it’s just like IPv4, only with a 128-bit address field”, through the models of “Aggregation Identifiers” and the hierarchy of “Top-Level,” “Next-Level” and “Site-Level” defined in RFC 2373 from July…
There was a draft that caught my attention during DNSOPS Working Group session at the recent IETF 118 meeting on the topic of “DNS IPv6 Transport Operational Guidelines”. This draft proposes to update an earlier guideline document with some new guidelines. The original document, RFC3901, titled “DNS IPv6 Transport Guidelines””,…
This is part of a personal commentary on the meetings at the July 2023 meeting of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF 117). If you want to know what was presented and the comments at the mic see the IETF 117 meeting archive. The IEPG meets for a couple of…
Following the publication of RFC 7872 in 2016, a number of research teams have been looking at the nature of network and host behaviours in discarding IPv6 packets with various Extension Headers (EH). The findings reported in RFC 7872 were a significant level of packet loss (“significant” being above 10%…
The topic of the robustness of IPv6 Extension Headers has experienced a resurgence of interest in recent months. I’d like to update our earlier report on this topic with some more recent measurement data. These extensions to the basic IPv6 packet header have their antecedents in the IPv4 option fields.…
The saga of the IPv6 transition continues to surprise us all. RFC 2460, the first complete effort at a specification of the IPv6 protocol was published in December 1998, more than twenty years ago. The entire point of IPv6 was to specify a successor protocol to IPv4 due to the…
It is a rare situation when you can create an outcome from two somewhat broken technologies where the outcome is not also broken. Unless each of the components can precisely complement each other such that a weakness in one can be covered by a strength in the other, then the…
I bet that nobody believed in 1992 that thirty years later we’d still be discussing the state of the transition to IPv6! In 1992 we were discussing what to do about the forthcoming address crunch in IPv4 and having come to terms with the inevitable prospect that the silicon industry…
The RIPE community held a meeting in November. Like most community meetings in these Covid-blighted times it was a virtual meeting. Here’s my notes from a few presentations that piqued my interest. All the material presented at the meeting can be found at https://ripe83.ripe.net/. Vulnerability Disclosure Responsible Disclosure is a…
