In the past I’ve written about a few ways you can set up decent IP traffic accounting on your network. If you have already set this up and are champing at the bit for more ways your can increase situational awareness of your network state you can try one of the following tools related to pmacct:

• http://www.pmacct.net/pnrg/
• http://www.aptivate.org/Projects.BMOTools.pmGraph.html
• http://www.net-track.ch/opensource/pmacct-snmp/
• http://code.google.com/p/netact/
• http://projects.celuloza.ro/bwstat/
• http://www.pmacct.net/fe/
• http://sven.anderson.de/flox/
• http://www.ntop.org/
• http://bandwidthd.sourceforge.net/
• http://nfsen.sourceforge.net/
• http://etherape.sourceforge.net/

These tools allows you to graph and/or analyse your traffic data in a variety of ways. If you are currently using one or more of these, drop us a comment and let us know your success or failure stories!

As mentioned on this blog a few times before, we’re committed to getting IPv6 happening at Anchor. While the live rollout date is probably still a while away, we have at least begun making some inroads on the progress. Today we received our IPv6 allocation from APNIC:

2407:7800::/32

That equates to about 2^96 IP addresses, roughly 10^28 or 79228162514264337593543950336. Quite a mind-boggling number. We’ll continue our research, documentation, testing and will let you know when we are ready to start handing out live addresses. Until then, if you are a customer or would like to be, please let us know you are interested in IPv6, as there are still not too many hosting companies who are using it. Amazing, given IPv4 addresses will run out in a couple of years at best.

Nobody is under any pretences that IPv6 will be close to 100% usage globally any time soon, so despite many entities having firm IPv6 plans or infrastructure already in place, demand for IPv4 is still strong. With that in mind, we’ve just acquired a new allocation from APNIC which will hopefully see us through until IPv6 is dominant on the Internet.

110.173.128.0/19

This allocation is from the 110/8 class A that was allocated to APNIC in November 2008, and represents a tripling of Anchor’s current IPv4 space. We’ll be following our current strict allocation policies to ensure it is the last additional IPv4 allocation we will need, and continuing with our current IPv6 plans as all responsible entities on the Internet should be doing.

I was dropped a quick note by one of the speakers at the IPv6 Implementors Conference which is being hosted by Google – http://sites.google.com/site/ipv6implementors/conference2009/

Sadly I had no idea this conference was on, as it looks like a valuable opportunity to learn about IPv6 and the progress it is making in the wild. I did get a couple of handy tips about how to improve our implementation plan though so not all was lost.

If you are attending this conference, you are more than welcome to leave comments on this blog post with your learnings – or even link to your own site – the more the merrier.

On day two of Linux Conf I was able to attend two presentations on IPv6 – System Administration Consequences of the Endgame of IPv4 and the Deployment of IPv6 by AARNET’s Glen Turner and Google and IPv6 by Angus Lees. Both were extremely informative and made it clear to me that we need to start gearing up for IPv6. By “we”, I mean the world.

Don’t get me wrong – if you are the average home user IPv6 (or even IPv4) will mean nothing to you and the advent of IPv6 addressing en masse will likely pass you by without you even noticing. Much like the Y2K bug though, it will only be with the coordinated efforts of the best network and systems administrators around the world that we’ll be able to jump the hurdle again so gracefully.

Glen painted a fairly grim picture – by around 2010 we should expect to run out of IPv4 addresses. Admittedly there are large historical allocations which have very little usage but we can expect these to turn into lucrative commodities, bought and sold for whatever price the seller decides. IPv4 addresses will still be available, but at insanely inflated prices. The upshot of this? You can expect ISPs to start dealing in Enterprise NAT. Publicly routable IP addresses for anyone who isn’t willing to pay the price will disappear, as will end-to-end connectivity. The new cash cow for ISPs will be selling broker services for any applications requiring end-to-end connectivity such as VoIP and gaming.

In actual fact, this consumer-driven environment may spell doom for IPv6. ISPs will be able to make more money by selling services that work around the limitations in IPv4, thus it is in their best interests to not make IPv6 available. Everyone would benefit from IPv6 but it needs to be made available first. Angus Lees presented a report on the IPv6 survey conducted last year by Google. Using a variety of techniques piggy-backing on their search interface they were able to determine that around 0.2% of their users have IPv6 access. However almost half of these are not working properly. This is not enough of a userbase for which to enable IPv6 fulltime, and certainly too many non-functional deployments for which to risk breaking their search engine.

Will we all benefit from IPv6? Yes. Is it necessary to ensure the Internet continues working effectively? Definitely. Is it that hard to deploy? Maybe not.

Anchor has decided to commit to deploying IPv6, and to demystify this process we will document our progress publicly. You can view our progress on our public wiki at http://www.anchor.com.au/hosting/IPv6. If you want to make the Internet a better place by pushing for the widespread deployment of IPv6, talk to your ISP and ask them what their IPv6 deployment plans are.