IPv6 in Education Question

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1

So Im giving an introductory talk on IPv6 for a state wide conference for tech coordinators for education. I have the usual catechism of reasons/advantages from the network side but was wondering if there were any good education specific applications of v6. My major goal is to help them understand the situation so that they can make use of the base of educators in our state to help spread the work about IPv6.

Thanks in advance,

Todd

Todd Christell

Manager Network Architecture and Support

www.springnet.net <http://www.springnet.net>

417.831.8688

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Christell Todd.vcf.sig (191 Bytes)

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2

Will your presentation viewed anywhere like youtube? I'd like to hear or see it.....

3

I don't know what their plans are but I'm NOT very photogenic... It is really a very basic introduction as the audience will have varied experience levels. Current IPv4 addresses, their exhaustion and why NAT is evil. Intro to the structure of an IPv6 address, beginning subnetting, getting a handle around how huge the numbers are, and why NAT64 is evil. Transition mechanisms and the inherent problems. Mostly trying to continue a grass roots effort to get things moving. When I talk to up streams and hardware vendors all I hear is "We aren't getting many requests for v6." So I'm trying to change that by stirring the masses to push IPv6 requirements to the parties in question.

Technically accurate, but something that they all can relate to and take home with them. That's mainly why I was looking for a few cool education-centric ideas to help instill some ownership.

Todd

Todd Christell
Manager Network Architecture and Support
www.springnet.net
417.831.8688

Key fingerprint = 4F26 A0B4 5AAD 7FCA 48DD 7F40 A57E 9235 5202 D508

- -----Original Message-----

Christell Todd.vcf.sig (191 Bytes)

4

Todd Christell <tchristell@springnet.net> writes:

So Im giving an introductory talk on IPv6 for a state wide conference
for tech coordinators for education. I have the usual catechism of
reasons/advantages from the network side but was wondering if there were
any good education specific applications of v6. My major goal is to
help them understand the situation so that they can make use of the base
of educators in our state to help spread the work about IPv6.

It's not a question of if but when IPv6 will be used on large scale in
the interned. So, form the educational side it's beneficial if students
learn about IPv6.

So much for the theory

I did quite a number of presentations on IPv6 some of them in at
university in Germany (not as some official talk but some user group /
some students asked me too). Some quotes:

"We don't' have time for this."

"Well our network equipment is 14 years old, we don't have a budget for
new stuff."

"We'll implement IPv6 in 13 years, it's when my colleague retires."

/me: "Cool. You have IPv6."
Professor: "I configured the tunnel myself. Our network people don't this the
topic."

Jens

5

Todd,

I'm sending you a link from something I blogged about on my site regarding IPv6.
I'll send it offline so others don't think I'm spamming the list...

6

Jens:

There some ISP's trying to push IPv6. Probably not until the masses really demand it in someway.
Or if Google pushes it or some well known company. Perhaps maybe an application that is IPv6 specific....

NAT's and transition protocols seems to extend the life of IPv4. I'm not against them though, they have served
us well....hard to let go of things that worked for you for so many years....

7

It is such a great opportunity.

I had chance to give similar speeches in Brazil last year, and choosed
to stress the following topics, besides the basic catechism:
- IPv6 is inevitable, it is already part of Internet, and will be fully
deployed in few years. Its deploying is slow, but the momentum is
increasing;
- Universities had an important role in IPv6 development some years ago,
and should be leading this process now, but they are not;
- It is very important to the Internet, that the network engineers learn
about IPv6, and use IPv6, inside universities and schools...
- Universities could help the national industry to adopt IPv6 in their
products, to secure the current market, or to conquer new ones.

[]s
Moreiras

So Im giving an introductory talk on IPv6 for a state wide conference for tech coordinators for education. I have the usual catechism of reasons/advantages from the network side

but was wondering if there were any good education specific applications
of v6. My major goal is to help them understand the situation so that
they can make use of the base of educators in our state to help spread
the work about IPv6.

8

Todd,
  Cisco is offering a 4 part series of Webcasts about IPv6 for
Education. I've watched the first two, and they haven't really
been too vendor specific, but some of it has been insightful,
especially from an Education standpoint. The first two are up on the
web, and the last two are coming, March 30th and April 13th. These last
two are on Security and Unified Communications, which may not be as
vital to your talk.
  If you (or anyone else) would like a link to the registration
for all of these, hit me off list, as I wasn't sure if it would be
considered spamming or not.
  
  Brandon Penglase

9

If implemented properly (i.e., not by using IPv6 to fake all the
properties of IPv4, as so many people seem bound and determined to do),
then there are several characteristics of IPv6 networks that are of
educational interest, though nothing in the protocol is
education-specific.

First and foremost is that IPv6 is simpler and thus cheaper. Easier to
build networks, merge them, expand them, contract them, split them.
Every subnet is the right size - no more slicing and dicing subnets,
endlessly rearranging too few addresses in new configurations. Design
costs go down, admin costs go down, management costs go down, equipment
costs go down. Because IPv6 is simpler, security is by definition better
and cheaper. Education being perennially penurious, all this has got to
be interesting!

IPv6 is easier to teach than IPv4. It doesn't have as many edge cases
and entrenched workarounds, the notation is cleaner, the protocols are
cleaner, and the same set of protocol tools (multicast, ICMPv6, ND etc)
is used more consistently.

End-to-end transparency means that IPv6 supports peer to peer naturally.
That means everyone (students, teachers, parents etc) can talk to each
other more easily without having to involve third parties, and can talk
to each other from anywhere on the globe. Less mediation, more direct,
more distributed.

The death of NAT will mean that more and more stuff will be hosted
locally - on teaching machines, student laptops, home PCs, mobile
phones. I think we will see fragmentation and distribution of things
that are now monolithic. Things like Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and so
on will be reduced to special purpose indexing services - or will die.
Why use them when you can have all your stuff on your mobile phone,
accessible 24/7, wherever you are?

I'm not sure about the future of VPNs. Mobile IPv6 is effectively a
global, standardised, very low-cost, built-in VPN. Students can be
inside the school network from home, on the road, overseas.... without
special infrastructure outside the home network.

So I'd expect to see IPv6 change the face of educational IT - but it
will change the face of IT everywhere.

Regards, K.

10

Jens:

There some ISP's trying to push IPv6. Probably not until the masses really =
demand it in someway.
Or if Google pushes it or some well known company. Perhaps maybe an applica=
tion that is IPv6 specific....

Google is pushing it. The problem is the brower vendors still don't
support multi-homed sites well despite it being in host requirements
for 20+ years. IPv4 + IPv6 give you a multi-homed site.

If you have IPv6 connectivity then you can get to google over IPv6,
they will even return AAAA records if you register with them. See
the browser problem above for why they are taking this route.

Mark

dig google.com aaaa

; <<>> DiG 9.3.2 <<>> google.com aaaa
;; global options: printcmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 54613
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 6, AUTHORITY: 4, ADDITIONAL: 4

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;google.com. IN AAAA

;; ANSWER SECTION:
google.com. 300 IN AAAA 2a00:1450:8006::67
google.com. 300 IN AAAA 2a00:1450:8006::68
google.com. 300 IN AAAA 2a00:1450:8006::69
google.com. 300 IN AAAA 2a00:1450:8006::6a
google.com. 300 IN AAAA 2a00:1450:8006::93
google.com. 300 IN AAAA 2a00:1450:8006::63

;; AUTHORITY SECTION:
google.com. 235307 IN NS ns2.google.com.
google.com. 235307 IN NS ns3.google.com.
google.com. 235307 IN NS ns4.google.com.
google.com. 235307 IN NS ns1.google.com.

;; ADDITIONAL SECTION:
ns1.google.com. 59146 IN A 216.239.32.10
ns2.google.com. 65481 IN A 216.239.34.10
ns3.google.com. 59146 IN A 216.239.36.10
ns4.google.com. 59146 IN A 216.239.38.10

;; Query time: 30 msec
;; SERVER: 204.152.184.67#53(204.152.184.67)
;; WHEN: Thu Mar 18 00:08:37 2010
;; MSG SIZE rcvd: 332

11

End-to-end transparency means that IPv6 supports peer to peer naturally.
That means everyone (students, teachers, parents etc) can talk to each
other more easily without having to involve third parties, and can talk
to each other from anywhere on the globe. Less mediation, more direct,
more distributed.

The death of NAT will mean that more and more stuff will be hosted
locally - on teaching machines, student laptops, home PCs, mobile
phones. I think we will see fragmentation and distribution of things
that are now monolithic. Things like Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and so
on will be reduced to special purpose indexing services - or will die.
Why use them when you can have all your stuff on your mobile phone,
accessible 24/7, wherever you are?

Good points.

Leon
CERNET2 network engineer
http://www.cernet2.edu.cn/index_en.htm

12

You're either going to have to sell them on future-proofing or
"We're sailing off the edge of the world in two years,
there be dragons there, train your folks now."

Remember that there are two IPv6 transitions
- introducing IPv6 and forcing some people onto it
- getting rid of IPv4 after IPv6 support is universal.

Death of NAT

NAT's not going away for a long time - IPv6 doesn't need it for
address space conservation,
and pretends not to need it very much for renumbering IPv6 to IPv6,
but it's widely used as a firewall substitute and administrative convenience.

The first IPv6 transition will eliminate some NAT in pure-v6 environments,
so there will be applications that are no longer broken and can Just Work,
but it'll also introduce several different flavors of IPv4-to-IPv6
NATs/tunnels/etc.,
so there are other applications that will get broken in new and creative ways.
The second IPv6 transition may really finish eliminating NAT,
but that won't be for *years*, and you'll need to get all your users
deeply involved in IPv6 long before that.

Other than networking research and networking-related training,
there really aren't education-specific applications of IPv6;
there are just sites that you can or can't reach with IPv4 or IPv6.
Any big commercial sites will stay reachable with IPv4 for a long time,
certainly until IPv6 has been well established for a couple of years,
and while there may be new content that's IPv6 only after a while,
commercial content sites are more likely to buy IPv4 space if they need it.
And most educational sites big enough to be Really Cool
already have enough IPv4 space to last a few years, though they
may very well start adding IPv6 connectivity just like commercial sites will.

13

Most students starting this year will be graduating in 3-4 years time,
in a world where IANA depletion will almost certainly have happened and
RIR depletion will either have happened or about to happen.

If they don't have a working knowledge of ipv6 at that point then
they're going to find getting employment a lot tougher.

Tony

14

You're either going to have to sell them on future-proofing or
"We're sailing off the edge of the world in two years,
there be dragons there, train your folks now."

Or sell them on the point that IPv6 is where the innovation is. We have
literally no idea what our children will be doing with restored
end-to-end transparency and abundant addresses. That's where education
has to be. It's not an educational "feature", but a very important
emergent property...

Remember that there are two IPv6 transitions
- introducing IPv6 and forcing some people onto it
- getting rid of IPv4 after IPv6 support is universal.

And the third (well, probably the second, between those two) - learning
to *really use* IPv6.

> Death of NAT
NAT's not going away for a long time - IPv6 doesn't need it for
address space conservation, and pretends not to need it very much for
renumbering IPv6 to IPv6, but it's widely used as a firewall
substitute and administrative convenience.

Both oddities that I confidently predict will not survive long in the
face of the enormous advantages that properly-implemented IPv6 can
bring. A teensy packet filter substitutes for the "security" aspect, and
PI address space deals with the second.

The first IPv6 transition will eliminate some NAT in pure-v6 environments,
so there will be applications that are no longer broken and can Just Work,
but it'll also introduce several different flavors of IPv4-to-IPv6
NATs/tunnels/etc.,

Sure, there will be practical reasons why people need this or that
half-solution, this or that broken stopgap. But we can keep the Dark
Years fewer by trying not to use them.

Any big commercial sites will stay reachable with IPv4 for a long time,
certainly until IPv6 has been well established for a couple of years,

We've all been here before. The same thing will happen globally as
happened in thousands of networks with IPX, Appletalk and DECNet. IPv4
remains only on sufferance. The alternative rapidly becomes vastly more
attractive as the connectedness of the new protocol snowballs. Pressure
builds from inside and out, and - way sooner than anyone expected -
there is a sort of communal sigh of relief and the old stuff gets
quietly dropped.

I wonder what landmarks we should designate as "IPv4 is done" - Google
dropping support for IPv4? And I wonder what the landmarks for the
beginning of the end would be - Windows 15 coming out with IPv4 disabled
by default?

Regards, K.