Here are a few words from my co-worker (David Lamotte) & me (Vincent
Seynhaeve) to present what we did and are doing at www.multitel.be in IPv6. The goal is to share our experience.
We have a static tunnel thanks to SixXSs since 2008 and we’re using router advertisements in our LAN (in fact in our principal VLAN). We got a /48 prefix from SixXS to make /64 networks. This tunnel is stable and we use it in production without problem (excepted one or two times but with very minor perturbations thanks to dual-stack). This was our first practical achievement to begin with IPv6. Later on we enabled IPv6 on our public web servers and mail servers (IMAP and SMTP) and added AAAA records for those 2 services. Step by step we started to activate IPv6 on several workstations in our LAN, at this time mostly Linux and Windows XP (with their limitations in term of IPv6 support). We use global prefix and ULA prefix for testing. When the first Windows 7 (OS that really support IPv6 for the majority of applications) arrived in our LAN it was a good opportunity to activate IPv6 on our internal web applications, network share server (samba) and network printers.
When our layer 3 switch was upgraded to support router advertisements (recently supported) we activated IPv6 in the others VLANs, in particular in our Wi-Fi VLANs.
The last step we achieved was the introduction of a stateless DHCPv6 to send the DNS server and the search list for ask DNS records over IPv6.
We think it was the most challenging part because we have to find the good host operating system and the good software for this. After doing several test with Windows Server 2008, Red Hat Entreprise Linux 6 and others (dibbler, wide), we choosed RHEL6 to host our ISC DHCP. Now we are doing some test to use IPv6 on our dedicated SAN network. The next steps will be: native IPv6 connection (but we have not all the cards in hand), IPv6 hosting in our DNS registrar, activate more and more applications in IPv6.
In conclusion we will say that everything run quite smoothly and when you find good documented software and a good network analyzer 🙂 it’s not that difficult (of course with a minimum knowledge of the theory).
The only big issue was the IPv6 availability of our public DNS server (we use a DNS hosted by SixXS for “the Google over IPv6” program).
So if you have some questions or if you want more details about our IPv6 deployment feel free to ask (ipv6[at]multitel.be).
With all this experience we have also rebuilt our IPv6 training to give more practical exercises to our attendees.
Regards,
Vincent Seynhaeve
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Vincent Seynhaeve – Multitel