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IP Drought begins today in Asia-Pacific

That’s it – the Asia Pacific region is the first to run out of IPv4 addresses.

This happened following an assignment of around half a million addresses to support the users at the Chinanet Fujian Province Network.

The pool of available addresses to the region including some of the world’s largest populations, such as China, India, Indonesia, and some of the world’s largest economies, such as Japan and Australia, has depleted to such low levels, that the registry responsible for distribution of these addresses will now ration them, such that any ISP requesting space will be given a single block of 1,024 addresses, on a single occasion only.

This is enough space to allow the ISP only to host NAT or ipv4 to ipv6 translation technologies.  It is not enough to address a large content infrastructure, hosting environment, or internet access customer-base.

The rules of the game have today changed for 50% of the world’s population, and they will change in Europe too in a few short months too.  If you do not have an IPv6 plan, then this is your new significant business risk – how will users with v6 only connections reach your content?  And if this is through a translation mechanism, how will you ensure quality, or that your end-to-end protocols (like voice, video, etc.) will work ?

Get in touch to continue the conversation!

UK Open Access Fibre

One of the main questions that enterprises ask NetSumo is how they can get access to better office connectivity, because their applications and workflow demand ever increasing quantities of bandwidth.  Solving bandwidth capacity issues in the data centre is easy today and less expensive than it has ever been, but turning up huge capacities in your home or office is much more expensive.

Solving this bandwidth starvation is the role of fibre optics and next-generation broadband.  A relatively simple way to roll out fibre backed technology is to use VDSL – service providers run high capacity fibre optic networks to distribution boxes in streets (FTTC – Fibre to the Cabinet), and utilise the existing copper infrastructure between street and house or business carries high speed internet.  The shortness of the copper run enables higher speeds. This is increasingly available from companies such as Digital Region Broadband, who offer 40Mbit broadband at consumer prices, but is obviously only available in specific neighbourhoods where the streetboxes have been rolled out.

Removing the copper element will enable much higher speeds and new products like premise-to-premise connectivity.  FTTP – Fibre to the Premises opens up a world where connectivity between service provider and your office can run at 100Mbit or Gigabit speeds.  Office-to-home or Office-to-office connectivity that runs at Gigabit or even 10Gigabit would be possible too. This would make remote-working via high definition video conferencing, ultra high speed access to company resources and files, and also better quality and more interactive entertainment services a normal thing for everyone.

However, a national – even urban wide – fibre rollout project is expensive because of the construction (civils) costs, legal costs, and impact on neighbourhoods.

Earlier this month, Ofcom released a statement on wholesale access products, explaining that they were planning to require BT to make access to their existing ducts, intending to make fibre rollout cheaper.  The two key mechanisms are:

• Virtual Unbundled Local Access – BT offer other service providers access to existing fibre.
• Physical Infrastructure Access – BT offer service providers space in their fibre ducts, allowing service providers to run their own fibre.

I welcome this development, but hope that the regulation framework mandated by Ofcom does not remove the incentive BT to roll out new ducts and fibres.  The regulation will be a success if it enables more regional FTTC broadband schemes like the one cited in South Yorkshire, and also if it makes new FTTP the ‘norm’ for all new housing developments and telecoms upgrades.  Further, another huge disincentive from rolling out fibre based services — the UK fibre tax — must also be repealed in order to achieve the typical 30Mbit/sec broadband that the EU wish to see for all citizens by 2020.

The modern day window tax on the internet

In 1696, King William III of England imposed a tax on glass. Essentially, houses with more than ten windows paid a levy to the government, but the tax is now remembered as unfair and very avoidable by bricking up the windows in your home. Today there is a new tax on glass – firms who light the glass in fibre optic cable pay the government a levy based on the length of the fibre. Again the tax is desperately unfair, and very avoidable because firms can just not roll out services on fibre.

When firms avoid fibre, it hurts us all.  When fibre is cheap, firms can use it to roll out super-fast broadband to their users, using the sort of technology that facilitates connections tens or hundreds of times faster than a typical UK home enjoys.  It also allows service providers to increase the capacity of their network edge, and to improve the robustness of their network – for instance by building more links between their network points.  Improved robustness also means better business continuity planning options, improving the availability of their services.  This tax kills faster access, and better services.

The fibre tax also worsens the conditions for international networks looking to build into the UK, for instance in order to bring their content and services to the UK market .  This is not a hypothetical risk, it is a game-changer that has destroyed the business cases of several projects that we have been contributed to last year.

This morning, George Osborne was on BBC TV explaining that he saw an advancement in next-gen broadband (based on fibre optic cabling) as a priority. If this is the case, then he must commit to repealing the 21st Century Window Tax. To date, they have only considered repealing the 50p per month tax on telephone lines that has been suggested by the hugely flawed Digital Britain study.

We are just not competitive with this tax.

2010 will be a bad year for ipv4

We are now at the end of January, but IPv4, the Internet’s core addressing protocol still has a nasty hangover, and all signs are pointing to 2010 being a bad year for the protocol.

Since January 1st, a few key milestones have passed, indicating how urgent the IPv4 rundown problem has become. Firms that rely on internet connectivity must take urgent action in light of the events:

• The allocation last week of two further /8s (blocks of IPv4 addresses with the same number before the first dot) to APNIC mean that for the first time, less than just ten percent of the IPv4 unallocated pool is available to be assigned.  At current utilisation rates, this pool will be exhausted in only 600 days.  Of course, the internet could stop growing, but all signs point away from this…
• The allocation of 1.0.0.0/8 is the assignment of the first really ‘dirty’ block of addresses, signalling that we really are in the run-down period.  Bad network design decisions in the past have meant that networks have ‘borrowed’ the use of addresses starting 1. for ‘internal use only’ or special applications on their network.  This means that organisations assigned address space starting ’1′ may well have partial connectivity even though they are rightfully assigned the space.  Examples are the braindead hotspot operators who take addresses like 1.1.1.1 to trigger hotspot logout, but a handful of examples appear across this address range.
• RIPE NCC, the organisation who assign addresses to networks in and around Europe have this month implemented their ‘run down’ policy which will mean that organisations requesting space will only be able to cater for their growth requirements for a very short amount of time.  This is to evenly spread the inevitable misery across the ISP community.

RIPE members should thoroughly audit their address space so that they can ensure that their records are accurate, because RIPE are more likely to ensure that address space is assigned to your end users in line with the community’s policies.  ISPs and services providers who need help can contact me for further information or specific assistance.

Organisations who rely on internet connectivity for their products should ensure their providers have an IPv6 migration plan in place.  Otherwise end-to-end connectivity for your home or office is unlikely to be something you can enjoy looking beyond the runout period.  Companies hosting network services, for example a website, should enquire what their host’s IPv6 plans are, and start to enable their services via v6.

There is real traction to ensure v6 support appears in both the hardware and services you need to connect to the internet.  It is easier today than before to find help making your services available via v6.  The alternatives – patchy connectivity via nested stacks of ipv4 islands, or no more end-to-end connectivity (so that your internet service is a walled garden), have much worse consequencies than learning to roll v6.

Engineers know the facts by now and have no excuse.  For more information, see the RIPE NCC’s information site, ipv6actnow.

IPv6 Track at NANOG

Greetings from Philadelphia!  I am presenting as part of the IPv6 at NANOG46 (click here for info of how to watch) at 9:30PM UK time today, or download the IPv6 for Enterprises presentation here, or see information about the other speakers here..

The messages are clear and simple.  Working now to get ready for the IPv6 transition will be less expensive and lower risk than waiting for IPv4 starvation to hurt.  I interviewed some key enterprises about their specific grumbles but the great news is that most are transitional and already people are working on fixing them.

18 months? And google are nimble?

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’.

Preventing Mailman annoyances

Inspired by TheHodge’s “After you install WordPress” article, I made a note of the things I did to configure a Mailman mailing list, after creating it.  Much of this is to make the look-and-feel replicate how I used to run Majordomo lists.

Firstly, I like the Bounce handling and web-interface to Mailman, so this is why I don’t just run Majordomo for lists any more.  Its worth pointing this out, in case you wonder why I still use tool B, even though I have to do lots of work to make it work like tool A !

After running newlist, I recommend the following configuration changes (defaults which are changed assume you are running the Debian packaged Mailman) :

• General Options – make the administrators email address a role account that you will not subscribe to the mailing list. This is basically so that if you bounce an administration message from Mailman, due to your spam filters or an error, Mailman wont decide to unsubscribe you from the mailing list!  I have had this happen to me before when I used to hand-check spam directed at uknot.
• Decapitalise public name of the list – to make it look neater, and more like the output of the ‘lists’ command in majordomo.  Don’t forget to decapitalise the subject line tag if you do this.  I also tend to make the subject line tag very small so that on little displays, it’s still possible to scan a folder and read threads of interest on subject alone.
• Disable monthly reminders – they are really annoying to your subscribers, and Debian’s default position is disabled, but some implementations do not disable subscription reminders.
• My users get confused by the Filter out duplicate messages to list members option.  When a list subscriber is cc:d to a list post, users tend to expect to see a copy of the mail in their inbox, and their mailing list archive.  I turn the filter off so that this happens.
• I tend to enable the Should administrator get notices of subscribes and unsubscribes option, so that I can track whether promoting a list in a certain place has worked!
• In “Non Digest options”, if I am migrating for a Majordomo list, I empty the box for message footer, and also tend to remove it when its a geek mailing list, as to most high volume mail readers, its obvious when an email has been posted to a mailing list, because its filtered into the correct mailbox !  For low volume lists that are intended for low volume mail readers, the footer might be useful.
• Check the reply to option, so that mailing lists that are intended to promote on-list discussion have a header that directs conversation back to the list, and mailing lists that will yield a high proportion of off-list mail do not have this header.
• Be slightly annoyed with me that the only English option in ‘Language Options’ is English (USA) when there is no English (UK).

Happy list-administration!

And you may find the following lists interesting to your work :

• mailop, for those who work in the field of mail systems administration.
• experts, for those who work in expert e-commerce roles.
• uknof, for those who work in network engineering roles, or systems/ISP environments.

2011 – An addressing odyssey. Preparing enterprise for IPv6.

Yesterday I gave a talk to Sheffield GeekUp on preparing enterprises for IPv6 [download].  The premise of the talk was :

• IPv4 addresses are scarse, and at current consumption rates, the IANA pool of free v4 addresses will be gone at the start of 2011.
• This starts a “Post IPv4 world” where the IPv4 internet continues to function as before (certainly initially), but obtaining new addresses becomes harder and expensive.  This inhibits expansion of existing firms, and new entrants to the market.
• Address trading is likely to lead to a larger routing table, meaning that failure-recovery times increase, and the risk of blackholes on the internet increases.
• Large broadband providers may not have enough v4 addresses to give one address per customer.  This means protocol translation techniques need to be used, which break the end to end model.  We rely on the end to end model when innovating new services on the internet.
• If services and consumers gradually roll v4 and v6 (dual stack), the negative impact of markets for addresses, routing problems, and translation can be mitigated.
• Service providers are enabling v6 in the core.  Enterprises need to move next in order to get the world v6 ready.

The advice I gave was :

• Today’s market leaders are already learning v6 lessons in their labs, (e.g. ipv6.google.com).  They are doing this to help them retain market leadership.  If you want to retain your market position, start labbing your applications and service provision with v6.
• Write a policy stating all new purchases of infrastructure and services need to be from providers with v6 support, or a well defined v6 road map.  In other words, make v6 a “life cycle upgrade”.
• Share information, and learn information from your industry peers.
• I also listed some advice to developers with regard to v4 and v6 differences.
• I then delivered a very quick primer to those who have not seen v6 deployed before.

My hope is that this talk is improved upon and delivered internationally to enterprises.