IPAM

Since the inaugural set of four new generic top level domains (gTLDs) was announced six weeks ago, the tally of new gTLDs has grown to 35. And the number of new gTLDs will likely continue to grow well into the hundreds during 2014 as respective domain applicants work through the approval process. Even today, the 35 newly delegated TLDs comprise just over 10% of the 343 TLDs in the Internet root zone. The table below summarizes the status of the today's TLDs by type (country code, generic, etc.), whether internationalized or not, and whether DNSSEC-signed or not. Starting at the bottom of the table, of the three generic-restricted TLDs, .biz, .name and .pro, only .biz is signed and clearly none of them are internationalized. The .arpa infrastructure domain is signed as well. None of the so-called sponsored TLDs are internationalized and about half are signed. All of the generic TLDs are signed, and the 35 new gTLDs fall within this row. In fact, all new gTLDs must be signed as ...

There's much to consider when developing an IPv6 address plan. Such a plan defines how you intend to allocate subnets from the IPv6 block you received from your ISP or Internet Registry. The first step entails defining how much address space is required across and into the depths of your IP network to provide IPv6 address capacity for those devices requiring it. You can use your current IPv4 address allocation database as a guide to define the active utilization of your IPv4 address space and should provide a solid basis for IPv6 capacity needs barring new network initiatives that increase address space usage. Once you've defined where in your network you require IPv6 addresses and how much , you should consider how to perform your allocations. One approach is to simply allocate all required /64 subnets directly from your base ISP allocation, using a monotonic, sparse, best-fit or random allocation approach. This single-tier allocation approach may work fine for small network...

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) announced last week that the first set of approved generic top level (gTLDs) has now been activated on the Internet by virtue of their delegations in the root zone of the global DNS system.  According to the announcement, the first four delegations are: شبكة  (xn--ngbc5azd) – Arabic for "web/network". The domain registry responsible for managing subdelegations from this new TLD is International Domain Registry Pty. Ltd. онлайн (xn--80asehdb) – Cyrillic for "online". The domain registry for this new TLD is   CORE  Association сайт (xn--80aswg) – Cyrillic for "site". The registry for this TLD also is   CORE  Association 游戏(xn--unup4y) – Chinese for "game(s)" and the domain registry is Spring Fields, LLC. Notice that all of these are  internationalized domain names (IDNs), with   each TLD listed first in its native character set, followed in parenthesis with its equ...

If your organization relies on the web for anything at all, you should start thinking about IPv6 deployment planning if you haven’t already done so. The reality is that the face of the Internet is changing from an IPv4-only Internet to a hybrid IPv4-IPv6 Internet. The density of IPv6 traffic today is quite low, just over 2% as recently measured by hits on Google web servers. Nevertheless, this represents a doubling of traffic from less than a year ago. If such an exponentially increasing trend continues, IPv6 traffic will comprise about one-third of Internet traffic by 2017. One-third of the Internet…at least one billion users by then….that’s a lot of IPv6 eyeballs and potential customers or consumers of your web information! And if they are seeking your email or web servers and you don’t support IPv6 reachability, they will by necessity go elsewhere. But 2017 seems so far away! What’s the hurry? The problem is that implementing IPv6 within your network may take some time. How much t...

IPv6 rollout appears to be moving slowly, and last week's Internet Society announcement that IPv6 traffic has reached 2% of total Internet traffic as measured by hits on google’s web servers would seem to reinforce this perception. While 2% penetration represents a doubling of IPv6 traffic since last year, the total is as yet unimpressive. But deploying IPv6 is not a trivial undertaking. While recent vintage networking equipment and device operating systems natively support IPv6, application and operational aspects require careful attention. Organizations need to verify proper application reachability and functionality over IPv6. Applications utilizing the current sockets or winsock equivalent interface to the TCP/IP layer should work seamlessly over IPv6. Those applications storing or visually displaying IP addresses of course may require modification to properly handle IPv6 addresses, and any hard-coded IP addresses may require modification to use multiple IP addresses or b...

Did last year's World IPv6 Launch inspire you to move forward with making or executing plans to deploy IPv6? The Internet Society links to several measurement sites, many of which indicate an increasing volume of IPv6 traffic. The World IPv6 Launch site also has a nice infographic that indicates that IPv6 web usage has doubled since the launch one year ago.  Is your network among the contributors to this increased IPv6 uptake? Make your voice heard by completing our annual IPv6 survey . This year's survey is very similar to last and prior years' surveys in order to help us identify trends and changing perceptions about IPv6. The survey should take about five minutes to complete so we invite you to let us know what you think. We're also going to be drawing the name of one survey respondent to whom we will award a $100 Visa gift card, so I invite you to complete the survey. 

If you are putting together your IPv6 address plan, you'll need to consider how you should allocate subnets from the IPv6 block you received from your ISP or Internet Registry. In fact you should consider how to design the structure of your IPv6 allocation hierarchy to simplify ongoing network management once deployment has begun.  The first step entails defining how much address space is required across and into the depths of your IP network to provide IPv6 address capacity for those devices requiring it. You can use your current IPv4 address allocation record as a guide to define the active utilization of your IPv4 address space. Once you've defined where you require IPv6 addresses, you'll next need to define how to perform your allocations. One approach is to simply allocate /64 subnets directly from your base ISP allocation, using a sparse, best-fit or random allocation approach.  This single-tier allocation approach may work fine for small networks, but for modest to...

We've just published a free online IPv6 subnet calculator for your use and enjoyment. For the uninitiated, a subnet is a subdivision or allocation of a larger address block. Subnetting is necessary to enable an organization to carve up the address block received from its ISP into subdivisions across the organization in order to provide IP address capacity to end devices requiring IP network access. In many enterprises, the subnetting process involves tiers or layers to better map to the organization's routing structure, security policies, applications' routing requirements, or other reasons. Thus in the simplest case, an organization choosing to use the private 10.0.0.0/8 space, they may choose to allocate bits 9-16 to the top layer of its address hierarchy. This would yield 256 subnets, starting from 10.0.0.0/16, 10.1.0.0/16, 10.2.0.0/16, on up to 10.255.0.0/16. Each /16 could in turn be further subdivided using bits 17-24 to create 256 subnets for each of the 256 /16 blo...

As we have done several times over the years, we are planning another webinar series offering educational material regarding IPAM technologies including IPv6, DNSSEC and IDNA. The full webinar lineup , dates and times, and brief synopses are posted on the BT Diamond IP website. Register for any number of topics you're interested in. When planning such a series, we certainly have no shortage of topic ideas. IPv6 as always remains of high interest from the Internet community at large. We ran an intensive 5-webinar IPv6 series about a year ago, and these webinars are still relevant and posted for playback on the BT Diamond IP website. So this time around, I selected three different IPv6 webinar topics.  The first seeks to relate IPv6 to "managers," which yes as the title unfortunately implies, is somewhat "dumbed down" technically in terms of describing IPv6, but it also includes topics related to how IPv6 can impact one's business. I'll discuss the...

It's been a few months since I've posted due to the urgency to finish my new IPv6 book, a death in the family and a period of abnormally onerous work requirements (always getting in the way!). My new book, co-authored with Michael Dooley is entitled, IPv6 Deployment and Management, ISBN-10: 1118387291/ISBN-13:978-1118387207, and will be available within the month. Mike and I were motivated to write this book given the myriad questions we received from customers, prospects, and acquaintances about how to go about IPv6 deployment. Certainly having worked with IPv4 and IPv6 from an IPAM perspective for several years, we were able to share our experiences. However, there's much more to deploying IPv6 than managing the IPv4-IPv6 address space! So we set out to learn about the broader aspects of IPv6 deployment thanks to extensive research and interaction with some of our colleagues, and we discovered that it touches every aspect of the IP network. And given that I've never...