IPv6

Nortel Delivers UC For Government

Companies generally have confidential information- financial projections, intellectual property, trademarked secret formulas, etc. But, the magnitude of secrecy and the need for confidentiality pale in comparison with a government, especially the United States government. Nortel has developed a new unified communications solution based on their Application Server 5300, which provides the level of service assurance and security that government agencies, and civilian agencies linked with the government require. The new offering complies with IPv6 and Department of Defense (DoD) requirements for secure, resilient VoIP and unified communications. The Nortel appliance also supports multi-level precedence and pre-emption, a DoD system to enable the most critical communications higher priority over existing calls.

Disabling IPv6 in Windows Vista

IPv6 is the latest, greatest, cutting edge version of the IP protocol. It is designed to be more secure, more efficient, more stable, and provide a larger (exponentially larger) pool of addresses to work with than its IPv4 predecessor. So, why would you want to disable it? In this SearchNetworking.com article, Brien Posey provides additional reasons, but the primary one is system resources. Windows Vista runs both IPv4 and IPv6 functionality simultaneously. If your network infrastructure is not actually leveraging the advantages of IPv6, then precious Windows Vista system resources are being eaten up by a protocol you are not even using. Of course, Posey also provides some logic behind why you would want to leave IPv6 on. Take a look at Disabling IPv6 in Windows Vista — Pros and cons to read the complete article and decide for yourself if you should disable IPv6 in Windows Vista.

What Happened to IPv5?

You are probably familiar with the fact that IPv4 is more or less the standard that the Internet and networks of the world rely on. IPv6 is the emerging standard developed to expand the available pool of addresses as well as addressing a variety of performance and security issues in IPv4. So, why did we never hear of any IPv5 equipment? Do they just count by 2’s when they are creating IP standards? Apparently not. Network expert Silvia Hagen addresses the issue of the missing IP standard in answering the question “Why wasn’t there an IPv5?”

EMC Introduces Technology to Manage IPv6

IPv6, the next generation IP protocol which is replacing the current IPv4 (not sure what happened to IPv5) has not taken off quite the way it had been anticipated. Still, the standard is being rolled out more and more, if by nothing more than attrition, and organizations need next generation tools to handle the next generation protocol. Storage vendor EMC has rolled out just such a tool. Their Smart IPv6 Availability Manager provides discovery, mapping, monitoring and root-cause analysis of problems for IPv6 networks, and is also backward compatible with IPv4 networks or networks that mix both IPv4 and IPv6. For more details about this IPv6 tool, check out this Computerworld.com article.

IP Addressing Crash Course

Do you understand the difference between classless and classful IP addressing? Can you explain what is different in IPv6 from IPv4 and why businesses or individuals should care? How about calculating a subnet mask- or determining the total possible IP addresses based on the subnet mask?

I had a mental block for years on the subnet mask thing. I just could not seem to understand how to do the math either way- either to determine the subnet mask based on the address space I wanted, or to determine the number of available addresses from the subnet mask. Then one day I had an epiphany and what was confusing suddenly made sense. You don’t have to wait for an epiphany though. TechTarget’s SearchNetworking site has a free crash course in IP addressing that will have you understanding that CIDR is different than the cider you drink and otherwise fluent in all things IP. Check it out here- Crash Course: IP addressing and subnetting fundamentals.

IPv6 Growing Pains

IPv6 has been the “emerging” standard for a couple years now. IPv6 was developed to replace the current IPv4 standard (what happened to IPv5?) and help to address some of the shortfalls in security and reliability with the protocol as well as to expand the available address space. It hasn’t taken the world by storm, but it is slowly spreading throughout organizations and the Internet. In recent tests, however, the IPv6 Consortium has determined that there is a learning curve that exists for network administrators to effectively implement and leverage IPv6. The protocol itself seems solid, but administrators need to know more about how and where to use it and which devices are compatible. Read IPv6 will require learning curve for network admins on Computerworld.com for more details about the test and some of the issues that were uncovered.