First Meeting of IPv6 Council
Location:UCL Campus of Woluwe-St-Lambert
Date: 16 of February 2011.
Welcome, Gunter Van de Velde
Gunter is happy, first NL IPv6 task force was 7 people 3 years ago, we are many more for our first meeting.
Our goal is to push IPv6 deployment in Belgium including IPv6 news in the newspaper.
Neighboring countries do better: not only in term of deployment but also in awareness (news & co).
25 people are in this room, 3 providers, 2 system integrators, Universities, …
IPv6 Deployment in Belnet, Jeroen Valcke
This presentation is from the viewpoint of a backbone engineer and not about servers and CPE.
Established in 1993 as the Belgian NREN (Universities, High Education, public administrations and hospitals), native IPv6 since 2003.
Belnet also runs the metro area network FEDMAN (Federal ministries in Belgium) and BNIX (the Belgian NIX). About 650.000 end-users.
Deployment started with training & experimentations. Followed by actual work: addressing & routing plan, implementation and configuration.
About addressing plan: keep it simple, sparse allocation (do not do sequential assignment to end-customers to allow for future expansion) plus some specific allocation for loopbacks, trunks and point-to-points (which are /64).
Using MPLS for now IPv4 and native for IPv6 => different traceroutes for address family. Next steps could be 6PE or IPv6-only core (but no real need now for traffic engineering for IPv6).
IPv6 peering is done with GEANT (the pan-european NREN), BNIX (Brussels), AMS-IX (Amsterdam), LINX (London), SFINX (Paris).
IPv6 assignments are still small: 36 out of 200 organizations (with a recent surge in 2010 with 15). Reaction in the room: is it small or large? Universities do not care ‘we do not even do NAT’.
Some issues found: reverse DNS is a pain, traffic monitoring (no MIB) – still no stats, skepticism & ignorance.
Conclusion: get educated, introducing IPv6 is not rocket science, think about addressing, get everybody involved (including servers and applications).
No IP address management tool was used.
Side comment from Maehdros: when they enabled IPv6 on their DNS server (with a glue record in dns.be) they immediately saw a 40% DNS being IPv6.
IPv6 Deployment at BT, Mircea Pisica
Even some recent CFP received by BT has a only single line about IPv6 that is not even a show-stopper.
BT network includes 80.000 ports in the MPLS and 12 million broadband connections (which is becoming urgent to address IPv4 exhaustion). BT implements IPv6 not because they can afford it but because they cannot afford not to.
Not easy to deploy IPv6 because there are so many pieces which still do not deliver services for IPv6 such as deep packet inspection, no transit SLA, … potential issue with the route reflector (a 32-bit machine handling a lot of private prefixes, cited the number of 1.8 million IPv4 prefixes).
The BT broadband deployment has required some extra hardware and is in trial mode now.
Q: v6 connectivity is it an extra cost? A: BT does not bill IPv6 but adding IPv6 to a MPLS client costs some money of BT (configuration).
IPv6 Deployment at Agence Wallone des Télécommunications, Stéphane Vince
AWT is the ICT public actor in Wallonia doing technology watch & awareness mainly for small and medium businesses. Stéphane is the system administrator so he offers a non-network point of view.
- 2006: got their IPv6 prefix,
- 2008: all external services were available via IPv6 through a reverse proxy,
- 2010: dual-stack LAN (about 100 endpoints) & DMZ.
The 2008 careful approach was limited to mainly 1 virtual machine doing reverse proxy and email relay. 2010: full dual-stack everywhere except to a few IPv4-only services and for remote access VPN. Two firewalls are used one for IPv4 and one for IPv6: to make it safer. The Cisco firewalls are used for inter-VLAN routing.
Lessons learned: IT & Net guys must be involved, have a good understanding of IPv6 (system migration, re-engineering, and configuration), check your ISP/network vendors, applications (such as log analyzer).
Web sites can be certified with the IPv6 forum in order to get a green IPv6 Ready logo.
There will be an IPv6 Cookbook in March on www.awt.be.
Biggest problem was to do the addressing plan.
Next actions? Olivier Bonaventure and Gunter Van de Velde
How can we go outside of this small community to raise awareness?
Awareness should also be targeted to developers of applications which too many things hardcoded for IPv4-only. But, how can the Council spread the IPv6 technology to developers? 2 weeks ago there was a FOSDEM event (open source community) where IPv6 was over WLAN. People should use higher level APIs that hide IP addresses and use DNS names instead of using the socket API that exposes too many details. Those API are available in Python, PHP and other languages.
Should we focus on actionable items by this community? Some ‘hearsay’ from customers is “Belgacom is not moving to IPv6 so IPv6 is not important” (so Belgacom is more than an ISP for many people as it is rather a though leadership).
Tip to spread IPv6: challenge some individuals to become the IPv6 leader in their organization and be the IPv6 expert to be recognized ☺
Belgium should also looking at US with Comcast and US Government initiatives.
If one major residential ISP started a pilot in Belgium, then students and other IPv6 council members would be ready to test (even without helpdesk, SLA, …). And, this would break the chicken & egg problem.
ISPs are not the only one to blame as there are also little requests from their customers.
Some voices are about to rely on Govt to raise awareness or (for some of us) put requirements on public sector administrations or ISP to get a better support of IPv6. Communication is at the Federal level for now (so neither at Region not at Community). What about getting a discount on tax-on-web when declaration is entered through IPv6?
8th of June, V6 World day: at least one Belgium hosting provider will move all its customers to IPv6 on that day (Maehdros). Next meeting should be in June after this day.
How many IPv6 DNS entries in the .be zone? Very little about 50 glue-records with little changes.
Location was ok even if challenging but perhaps not in the same classroom.
List of participants
- Andrew Yourtchenko, Cisco
- Arnaud Hautem, Belgacom
- Bruno Delcourt, FUNDP
- Bruno Mairlot, Maehdros
- Bruno Quoitin, UMons
- Carl Wuyts, Technicolor
- Damien Saucez, UCLouvain
- Danielle Jacobs, Beltug
- David Lamotte, Multitel
- Eric Vyncke, Cisco + Université de Liège
- Franck Hofman, Dimension Data
- Gunter Van de Velde
- Jeroen Valcke, Belnet
- Jerome Paquay, Cisco
- Maite Grisard, Maehdros
- Marc Neuckens, Belgacom Explore
- Mircea Pisica, BT
- Olivier Bonaventure, UCLouvain
- Philip Leenaerts, Devoteam
- Philippe Du Bois, DNS
- Pierre Reinbold, UCLouvain
- Stefaan Vander Rasieren, Cisco
- Stephane Vince, AWT
- Vincent Seynhaeve, Multitel
- Virginie Van den Schriek, UCLouvain