[tech] IPv6 at increasing usage

David Adam zanchey at ucc.gu.uwa.edu.au
Mon Aug 24 18:26:37 WST 2009


After my talk at tech-contacts last week, there was a bit of interest 
about IPv6, so I decided to see what was happening at UCC with IPv6. If 
you know what the current state of play, skip to the bottom.

To recap - UCC is routed 2001:388:7094:4080::/54 (4080 - 40bf inclusive) 
from UWA. This used to go over a tunnel to AARNET's Sydney tunnel 
broker, but UWA now peers native IPv6 to AARNET. This makes the connection 
a fair bit faster and more reliable.

We hand out IPv6 address to clients who will take them using RADVD on 
Madako, on the clubroom, the wireless and the loft network. As far as I 
know you don't get IPv6 on the VPN.

Many machine room systems have IPv6 address, which are statically 
assigned. These are available in DNS using the ipv6.ucc zone (e.g. 
martello.ipv6.ucc.asn.au). There is no reverse DNS at this stage, although 
the delegation from AARNET to UWA exists. It would be nice to fix this, so 
I might file a ticket with ITS.

We don't currently charge or get charged for IPv6 traffic - according to 
ITS this is likely to continue at least in the medium term.

There is very little firewalling in the central firewall for IPv6. Manbo's 
IP is protected, but everything else is accepted. There is some 
firewalling on individual machines. Someone should probably fix this. It 
would be nicer to do it using something that synchronises the IPv4 and 
IPv6 port availability, but that may require The Great Firewall Rewrite.

----

Anyway, this is all a prelude to thinking about increasing our use of 
IPv6. Why? Because we can!

1. I was thinking about emailing Google to ask if we can get our subnet 
placed on Google's IPv6 list, so that requests to Google go over IPv6. See 
google.com/ipv6

2. We could put AAAA records back in for various hosts in the main 
ucc.asn.au/ucc.gu.uwa.edu.au domains. Our connectivity is now good enough 
that it is clients' networks who would be the problem.

3. <your idea here>

David Adam
UCC Wheel Member
zanchey at ucc.gu.uwa.edu.au


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