Anchor’s networking and automation gurus have been hard at work preparing our new kit over in the US, and the day we go live is fast approaching. In the process we’ve had literally zero personal presence over there, not one plane ticket was bought. That we can get away with this is mostly thanks to two things: Equinix and DRACs (Dell’s remote-management interface).

Equinix

One of the reasons we went with Equinix is their high level of support, which goes nicely with Anchor’s approach to business.

The servers were dropshipped direct to the LA3 datacentre where staff unpacked them and racked them up according to our instructions. Once the DRACs were plugged in it was our turn to get excited.

DRACs

DRACs let you do stuff remotely, pretty much anything short of implementing a big red self destruct button. Wanna boot an OS install image from 12,000km away? You can do that.

With a little bit of shuffling, we’ve bootstrapped a new environment over there, ready to build high-availability VMs and servers.

The core of Anchor's LAX1 presence, all gigabit and redundant up the wazoo

IPv6

Which brings us to the fun stuff. The question of offering IPv6 has been on the cards for four or five years now, but to date there hadn’t been enough of a business case for us to commit to. The LAX1 POP changes this.

Anchor’s initial offerings will be focused on our VPS product, which will have full dual-stack connectivity from day 0. For those customers with IPv6 aspirations, we’re ready for you. For everyone else, we hope its enabled-by-default status will drive some interest.

As a small mark of this commitment, we’ve given our DRACs IPv6 addresses only. The practical upshot of this is that it forces us to ensure that all our infrastructure supports IPv6 – routing, switching, DNS, the works. This is popularly called “eating your own dogfood”, we wouldn’t sell something that we don’t use ourselves.

Why IPv6?

For those who don’t follow the IPv4 to IPv6 transition, the rest of this post will summarise Anchor’s perspective specifically.

It’s generally agreed that we’re going to run out of the IPv4 addresses that we know and love, and quite soon. Estimates vary, but unless there’s a revolutionary change in our use of addresses it looks like we’ll hit the wall within about three years.

IPv6 support in the backbone of the internet is already well established, but the real challenge is pushing it all the way to end-users. IPv6 requires big changes through the entire technology stack: routers, switches, firewalls, DNS, servers, operating systems, application configurations and more, it’s all there.

This makes it extremely costly to retrofit existing systems. ISPs have a nasty chicken-and-egg problem because of that – given that demand will only be driven by availability, it’s much easier to do nothing instead of committing to big spending with uncertain returns.

Even assuming that an ISP wanted to sell IPv6 to their consumers, there’s very few content providers doing IPv6. Due to aforementioned lack of demand, content providers would be crazy to present IPv6-only content and lose the whole IPv4 market. Given this, it ultimately looks like the shift to IPv6 will be driven by “external” forces.

As an example, big companies like Google are in a position to push for adoption (try visiting http://ipv6.google.com/), and in theory even offer IPv6-only content that enough users would hassle their ISP for. On the other end of the hypothetical stick, if hosting providers increase the cost (technical and monetary) of IPv4 hosting, it could push enough content to IPv6 to grind through a transition.

These are just two examples, but hopefully they illustrate the difficulty and significance of the problem.

• 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!

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.

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.

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.

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.