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Day 3+4 of the V6 World 2012 Congress
were also interesting.

In many ways my conclusions of the first two conference days were reconfirmed but additionally I learned that;

1. IPv4 is here to stay and it will take many more years before IPv4 is completely history. On the other hand, it is still unpredictable when IPv4 address space is really exhausted. See Geoff Huston’s IPv4 reports. Predictions are currently somewhere later this year or perhaps 2013 or even later, depending on the demand for IPv4 addresses and the way the use for IPv6 actually evolves.
2. Any NAT technology like Carrier Grade NAT (CGN) has disadvantages to make it a viable transition mechanism. As such it is less preferred.
3. Dual stack is the preferred transition mechanism. Where the content provider or hosting party provides access to (web) services via both IPv4 as well as IPv6.
4. The sheer size of the IPv6 address space requires to get rid of the classical IPv4 thinking regarding address waste and the use of private IP addressing. These limitations simply don’t exist anymore. Currently the smallest routable IPv6 subnet is a /64 subnet which could have up to a maximum of 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 unique IPv6 addresses. Think about it; each /64 subnet is significantly larger than the existing IPv4 address space altogether!
5. If the 100 biggest web sites in the world (the likes of FB, Google, Yahoo, Amazon, Microsoft, Akamai, etc) would get accessible via IPv6, it would ensure that the world would adopt IPv6 much faster.
6. End users need to have IPv6 enabled Customer-premises equipment (CPE) such as mobile devices, DSL modems and routers, before the content providers and ISPs really would benefit the transition. Without these IPv6 enabled devices there is simply no demand for IPv6. This chicken-egg problem needs to be addressed on either side; both the ISPs as well as content providers needs to provide IPv6 solutions to address the IPv4 exhaustion and global expansion of Internet enabled devices.
7. If vendors say that they are IPv6 ready, do not take this for granted. Many implementations have shown (interoperability) limitations when deployed. Inform the vendor of any issues so that this gets improved.
8. Basic IP address space allocation:
   a. /32 for Schuberg Philis
   b. /48 per customer environment
   c. /64 per smallest subnet (VLAN)
   d. /127 potentially for point-to-point links (on demand, implementation specific, not internet routable)

The Dual stack mechanism
an interesting solution to implement IPv6 is providing web services in a so called ‘dual stack’ setup. This means that content is provided both via IPv4 as via IPv6. There are several dual stack scenario’s.

Tore Anderson of Redpill Linpro AS discussed the following scenario, an IPv6 centric dual stack set up, his recommendation and in his opinion most future proof:

I found this an interesting view as it emphasizes on the majority of components within an IT (hosting) environment being IPv6 configured but only a small part of it being IPv4 capable. This scenario would lead to a more future proof set up, focusing on the phase out of IPv4 altogether.

A bogon is a …
Something I also learned but until this conference I’ve never heard of before, is a so called bogon.

It’s wikipedia definition is:

“a bogus IP address, and an informal name for an IP packet on the public Internet that claims to be from an area of the IP address space reserved, but has not yet been allocated or delegated by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) or a delegated Regional Internet Registry (RIR).”

I actually found this quite funny because I’ve been around in this industry for some time now so I was somewhat surprised that I haven’t heard of this word before.

All in all,
This was a very interesting conference where I learned that IPv6 is inevitable and that the momentum is now to prepare for it. 6 June 2012 is the day to mark your agenda; it will be the day when IPv6 will permanently be turned on by many internet (content) providers.

Don Lee from Facebook and author of the Cisco Press book “Enhanced IP Services for Cisco Networks” argued; “It’s our job as IT professionals to make the transition to IPv6 as smooth as possible. The end users should not bother about it, much less as they bother nowadays about IPv4.”

And as Paul Zawacki, Enterprise Architect at Oracle so eloquently put; “IPv6 is a giant leap in IT evolution. It might very well be the most challenging moment in your professional career.”

I feel that these remarks are no understatements… Do you?

A marathon day
Day 2 of the IPv6 conference was actually pretty good. It was a ‘marathon’ day of +10hrs of presentations and panel discussions. Unfortunately during the last ‘talking heads’ sessions the best part of me already left the building and concentration dropped. Nonetheless it was a good day and the welcome drinks+bites at the end of the day were rewarding

The opening speech
was done by John Curran, the founder and president of ARIN (the American Internet Registrar, the equivalent of the European RIPE organization). John was involved in IPng the early RFCs of what eventually became known as IPv6. How cool is that!?

My colleague Erwin Blekkenhorst (maintainer of IPv6.net) also tweeted a lot of interesting remarks and sound bites. Follow ‘@ipv6dotnet’ for getting those tweets.

During the panel discussions several companies shared their views and experiences on the IPv6 implementation and IPv4 to IPv6 transition. Better said co-existence or ‘dual stack’ providing your services via IPv4 and IPv6 in parallel.

I will not bore you with an exhaustive summary (send me a message and I will) of each presentation but I’d like to condense it into a) it’s interesting and worthwhile being at this conference and b) I feel that this is the environment were ‘it’ actually happens; the Internet industry adopting IPv6.

My conclusions
of the second day would be:

1. Moving from IPv4 to IPv6 is inevitable. Not being part of it is basically ‘missing the boat’ and loosing the competitive advantage.
2. Be prepared before actually implementing IPv6. Have a sound strategy resp implementation plan.
3. Implementing IPv6 is a ‘journey‘. Take it on a step by step basis and learn as you go and grow.
4. Despite many (hw or sw) vendors say that they support IPv6 they do not always interact as you’d expect.
5. So in addition; try before you die (i.e. perform a POC ensuring that your design is providing what you aim for. Feed the findings back to the hw/sw vendors.
6. Expect to spend a lot of time on awareness and training. Knowledge on IPv6 is the critical success factor.
7. From a Schuberg Philis IPv6 Task Force perspective we seem to be aligned with what the industry as a whole is doing; we are part of the IPv6 community for some time now and are already enabled on connectivity level. Application layer IPv6 is our next challenge.
8. I believe it is important that Schuberg Philis and our customers who are able to participate are part of the IPv6 World Day June 6, 2012. Let’s go for it!
   The FUTURE is NOW!

I’m visiting the V6 World Congress 2012 together with collegue Erwin Blekkenhorst (a long time IPv6 adept and owner of ipv6.net as well as its corresponding Facebook web page). This IPv6 congress is held Feb 7-10 in Paris, France.

Central question of this congress is: “Enterprises Migration: How and When?”

Amongst others, both Erwin and me are IPv6 task force members within Schuberg Philis and we are determined to increase the IPv6 awareness with our fellow collegues and our customers. The questions we would like to address are: How will it impact us, our business and what will it mean to our customers, what are the ways to ‘migrate’ safely from IPv4 to IPv6 resp to operate a dual stack setup?

On this blog I’ll be posting our experiences and impressions of this congress on a day-to-day basis.

Day 1 – Technical Tutorial Day – Tue Feb 7th

While doing a performance test on one of our customer environments we observed the impact of TCP offload and “Receive Side Scaling” (RSS) settings on the interface card on Windows web servers in combination with traffic handling.

Setup:

1. 2x Mercury Load Runner generators hitting public URL of customer

2. Served by 3x Windows2003 SP2 servers, running IIS6

3. Load being balanced by Cisco CSS11503 to web farm.

The CPU performance graph of the web servers with TCP offload and RSS enabled on the internet facing (FRONT) interface:

Similarly but a more outdated graph even more clearly showing that traffic is alternating from one web server to another:

Most interesting right!?

What makes this traffic to alternate if the load balancer has been set up to distribute the load evenly across the farm resp each Load Runner vuser to clear its cookies and session cache after each request?

We then stumbled over this read, knowing that TCP offload to network card is a classic one , but still:
http://blogs.msdn.com/psssql/archive/2010/02/21/tcp-offloading-again.aspx

And found out the characteristic that when TCP offload and RSS were disabled, the load is more evenly spread across the web farm:

I find this pretty cool.

Any comments?

LISA is for sure is sort of event where every geek will find himself like home. It is really good feeling to be surrounded by people who know stuff and enjoy technology everyday.

So LISA09 took place between 1 and 6th of November, 2009 in lovely Baltimore, MD. I chose to follow more the tutorials (trainings) path. Got five tutorials – one bad, two medium and two nice ones. The problem with tutorials is that sometimes they are very basic which I really didn’t expect to be a case on such event.

Read more…

Already three weeks back from Lisa, and after some gentle stimulation trying to write down my experiences of this event. For the people who don’t know LISA, LISA is the Large Installation System Administration conference, a whole week of talks, trainings and workshops about various subjects all related to the work of unix admins in big IT environments.

From what I understood from people who had been here previously, the attendee list was a lot smaller than previous years. But still, there were more than enough people to share a talk with. It was good to have the opportunity to talk to people working at some big and very known companies like Yahoo, Pixar etc. But also I met some people who worked for less know companies (at least for me) but maybe even more interesting companies, for example, the national democratic institute.  A non-profit organization facilitating democracy in countries where democracy isn’t that natural as in most western countries. I don’t think a lot of system admins have to worry about problems like militia stealing servers from your datacenter.

The first 5 days I followed a set of trainings, some days training for the whole day, some days a morning and an afternoon session. In general I was a bit disappointed by the trainings, they covered a lot of basic stuff, a whole day can be a very long sit for just 2 new bits of information. But a few sessions were quite interesting and/or entertaining.

Read more…

Every once in a while, I resort to one of the many “what’s my IP” type websites to lookup which external IP address I’m currently using. These sites have their uses for both professional, as well as personal purposes. Many of these sites provide a lot more information than I’m really after. In the end, I only want to see my current external IP address.

All the well intended, but known, technical and geo-location info presented by the numerous “what is my IP” sites tends to draw away attention from what you’re after and it doesn’t really play well with tools like ‘curl’ or ‘wget’.

There used to be a simple site I used, which just returned just your IP address located at http://www.whatismyip.org/, but this one also grew a lot of fat. Yesterday, I once again found myself looking for an external IP address, on a server with ‘curl’ and ‘wget’, and decided it was time I rolled what I was looking for myself. This turned into an extremely simple mod_python based scriptlet, which provides a no frills “What’s My IP” service, returning nothing more than a “text/plain” response with your current IP address.

This service is running on my recently upgraded employee rack server at Schuberg Philis at  http://ip.yppy.eu/. For me it provided useful and I hope other people also find this ‘less is more’ service of use. And yes, I will keep it clutter free.