Google recently announced that they’d done a front-to-back implementation of IPv6, using engineers’ spare time, in 18 months.  Cue well over 100 comments on slashdot claiming that this goes to show how hard implementing any sort of v6 service is at all, given it takes a company known for hiring smart people as long as 18 months.

I decided to put the timetable to the test.  On Wednesday at 2:30PM uk time, I applied for a /32.  One hour later, we were allocated 2a02:c30::/32.  I straight away assigned a /48 for our network infrastruture, and another for our production hosting lan, another for our development hosting lan.  From these /48s, several /64s were reserved, one for router loopbacks, another for point to point links, more for individual hosting applications.  An hour later, this was implemented on our network – routers had loopbacks, and a v6 IGP was up and running, and working.  I filed a ticket with our upstreams, and the first announcement was turned up minutes later – check BGPlay for exact times.  Around 2 hours after making our application to RIPE, we were participants on the IPv6 internet.

Now this is not a front-to-back implementation, but in just two hours we had something to hand over to our systems teams for testing and training.  If you rely on the internet for your business, this is the stage you need to get to urgently.  In fact, by close of play Wednesday, some of our simpler services were already running dual stack, and additionally we are now running Dual-stack for DNS – Nominet having the simplest method for adding ipv6 glue.

Full disclosure: In reality our v6 rollout started months ago, by monitoring advice on operational mailing lists, attending v6 seminars, and in fact we had been engaged in the rollout of ipv6 on several customer networks to date, so this rollout was not frightening for us.

We are now in the position that we can integrate IPv6 addressing as part of every configuration refresh or maintenance on our services, so that v6 is rolled out in a controlled, monitored, and careful manner.  By moving now, we have bought ourselves time – a luxury, and firms waiting longer to start their v6 rollout will have a harder time, with the whole migration feeling like a ‘y2k bug’.