domingo, 21 de septiembre de 2008

IPV6 and migration.. what do you think?

I'm publishing here a couple of comments I added to a board of comments. Take a look and tell me what do you think about that.-

part 1.-

Besides security enhancements, that are really important, now we need to evaluate that... mmm First, everybody knows that IPV6 is better than IPV4. But is this a technical or and strategic decision? As any big change we will need a business case. (Take a look to this article) http://searchnetworking.techtarget.com/generic/0,295582,sid7_gci1317674,00.html
It will impact both on the consumers (companies) indirectly on the final users, and of course on the providers that need to change, and support not only IPV6 but also IPV4 during the apparently long time of migration. As well as there are more workarounds extending life-time of IPV4, is business case still weak?

part 2.-

As I can remember on the mid 90s companies started to be aware of two basic things about public IP addresses, if they allocated all their stations and server on public IP addresses:
Security was a big issue (at that time virus started to be over internet, more inexperienced (not technical users downloading MIRC (do you remember that?) and a lot of things from internet (proxy servers were on an early stage at that time also).
And, allocate a lot of public IP addresses is expensive as you need a lot of subnets to cover al your stations and sever.
Of course solutions with NAT, regarding hiding addresses and port translation implemented with Firewalls and or Routers, and sophisticated implementations of DMZ (Demilitarized zones) started launching at that time. Moreover, CIDR (Classless Inter-Domain Routing) was a solution to a scalable distribution to distribute IP address, with subnets (so you don’t need to allocate the full class) and supernets (if you need more addresses).
But returning to the IPV6, both NAT and CIDR are workarounds… we will need to migrate to IPV6 sooner or later. What do you think?

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