IPAM

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...