Well at the moment I am in Belgium on the 2nd leg of the HP Campus Tour.

We are traveling around Europe over the next few weeks stopping off at a number of Universities and demonstrating all sorts of HP products to students, staff and HP Partners.

So far we have been through Sweden, and at the moment I am sat in my hotel room waiting to leave for the airport to catch my flight down to Italy.

We will be in Milan and Rome over the next week with our truck and then I head home for a couple of days whilst it drives to Hungary, from Hungary we are then heading to Estonia and then onto Finland for the final stretch.

So far the show has been running very well and has been well received in each country we have visited.

We are running on a satellite service for our Internet connectivity at the moment although we also are using local 3G SIM cards as backup.

Well it’s happened, at midnight on 1st Feb 2010 IANA announced that they had allocated two /8 IPv4 address ranges to APNIC triggering the automatic allocation of the remaining five /8 ranges to the other RIR’s.

So where does this leave us?

Well, from now on it is going to become increasingly harder to obtain IPv4 allocations from ISP’s. The bigger ones out there will probably deplete their supply by the end of this year, smaller ones such as AAISP and others likely have enough to keep going for a couple of years yet.

This could lead to all sorts of poorly designed systems featuring multiple layers of “carrier grade NAT” (CGNAT) which will likely cause no end of problems with many applications such as games consoles, SIP telephony and make it so people are unable to easily host services from their home connections.

As a network architect I find the idea of breaking end to end connectivity a bad design, it is against the whole principals of IP communication that every device should be able to talk directly with every other device, so from my point of view IPv6 is a very good thing. The abundance of addresses and the way in which we can subnet allocations mean IMO that it is in fact now so much easier to design proper networks.

In the medium term it means organisations that are not yet connected to the IPv6 internet should probably consider doing so sooner rather than later. If you’re in the process of buying new network infrastructure and want it to still be of use in the next 2 years then ensure it supports IPv6. If it isn’t then put pressure on your salesman to get it sorted or take your business elsewhere.

The news that IPv4 has run out really isn’t the end of the world, it’s been a long time coming and we have an alternative system.

IPv6 has been around since the mid 90’s and any modern computer or device should be able to operate in dual-stack configuration i.e. having both an IPv4 presence and IPv6 connectivity. There is also no need to disconnect yourself from the rest of the world as some pathetically bad reporting in recent days would have you believe (recent articles on FOX news and an Australian website are some of the worst).

What we lack at the moment is affordable consumer level (sub £50) CPE that supports IPv6 and does not require any complex user interaction to set up. The equipment that I work with on a day in day out basis (Cisco, Juniper, Meraki etc.) all supports native IPv6 and for the last couple of years I have been deploying it at all our events where possible.

A lot of people have concerns about security with IPv6 deployment, sure it might be different from how it has been in the past for most users hiding behind a NAT router which gives some mild degree of protection to inside hosts, but at the end of the day if you’re serious about security you would have and should have been firewalling IPv4 anyway, so it’s just a case of applying the same filtering and rules to IPv6.

Anyway, I am going to leave it at that. IPv6 has been happening for a while and it is now going to gain momentum. If people can’t deal with it they will be left behind and find that they have infrastructure that doesn’t work properly any more.

If people would like any more advice or have any projects that need a network designer experienced in deploying native IPv6 in a wide range of environments I can be contacted here :)

Over the last couple of weeks I have had the pleasure of working with Pylon One building the network infrastructure for the media facilities at Holyrood Palace for the State Visit to the UK by Pope Benedict XVI.

This high profile event has attracted massive media attention not only for its unique and historic characteristics but also the controversy surrounding the nature of the state visit granted to the Pontiff.

Pylon One were responsible for providing all of the internet access for the media across every site featured during the four day tour of the UK by the Pope.

At the Edinburgh Media Centre we provided connectivity for some 30 edit booths and radio broadcast rooms and capacity for up to 150 members of the written press.

Pylon One made extensive use of Cisco Catalyst switches and Aironet Wireless Access Points to achieve a robust, secure and reliable network for use by the media, broadcasters, production staff and crew.

External connectivity at the site was provided via a 100Mbit BTNet fibre installed specifically for the event and in very short time scale – something that in itself is no easy task!

Overall the event ran very smoothly with no issues experienced during the course of the media presence at Holyrood. This was my first job working with the team from Pylon One and I look forward to working with them again in the future on other projects.