Your Vote For A Strong Voice For IPv6 And For The Future Of The Internet!

Your Vote For A Strong Voice For IPv6 And For The Future Of The Internet!

Earlier today I was informed by FedScoop that I have been nominated for the 2015 Digital Innovation Award. The winner of the award will be announced at the 2015 Digital Innovation Summit on October 14, 2015 at the event to be held at the Newseum in Washington, DC.

I am extremely honored to have been nominated by my peers for this award. Even though I am not running for the office in this election season, but I will need your vote for a strong voice for IPv6 and for the future of the Internet!  LOL

Here is the link to all of the nominees of 2015 Digital Innovation Award: http://fedscoop.com/events/digital-innovation-summit/awards/

IPv6, It Is Not That Complicated After All!

In the final analysis, to enable IPv6 is only a configuration change to the existing networking infrastructure!

Notwithstanding the seemly lengthy and complicated format of IPv6 address, which is represented as eight groups of four hexadecimal digits, each group representing 16 bits (such as 2001:0db8:85a3:0000:0000:8a2e:0370:7334), whereas the IPv4 address uses a dotted-decimal format, where each byte ranges from 0 to 255 (such as 10.1.1.1), to configure and enable IPv6 in the networking infrastructure is NOT that complicated.

From the network engineers’ perspective, to deploy IPv6 is no more complicated than to introduce a new OSPF routing instance or to establish a new BGP session in your current production network environment. At the end of the day, to enable a separate IPv6 stack in parallel with the existing IPv4 stack in a so-called dual stack configuration in the current networking infrastructure is simply a configuration change by adding only a few command lines to the network devices and hosts (such as routers, L3 switches, firewalls, servers, etc.), similar to what you would normally do to enable a new OSPF routing protocol or  to establish a BGP session with your peers for the network devices, provided that the current network devices and systems in your organization are fairly up to date. If that is not the case, then your network infrastructure will potentially have more than just a problem to support the IPv6 in a dual-stack mode of operation with IPv4 and IPv6.

Consequently, it is very misleading and disingenuous for someone engaged in the practice of adopting the IPv6 to constantly keep mixing up a simple technical matter with complicated and unnecessary political debates and even geopolitical politics in both the global forum and some of the relevant international conferences.

As Vint Cerf, one of "the fathers of the Internet" and the co-inventor of the TCP/IP protocol, once said, the IPv4 that we are using today is only “the experimental version of the Internet” and it was somehow leaked out to the rest of the world from his original experiment. He called the IPv6 as “the production version of the Internet” for the 21st century.

If that is the case, why does anyone still want to keep running a beta version of software in the production environment?! Why can’t we just perform a simple configuration change in our current networking infrastructure to upgrade the beta version of the IP code to the real production version of the Internet so that we will be able to continue to support the future growth and development of the new Internet?!!

Disclaimer: The views presented are only personal opinions and they do not necessarily represent those of the U.S. Government

IPv6, To Lead, or To Be Lead?

From a holistic perspective, as far as IPv6 is concerned, it eventually comes down to this very simple question: To lead or to be lead?

Do we want to continue to lead the rest of the world in terms of supporting the future development and growth of the Internet and the related technological innovations in the era of IoT, or do we want to let the rest of the world to not only take over the discussions on the future governance of the Internet from the policy perspective, but also take the lead in adopting and deploying IPv6 so that they could gain more real world experience and technical knowhow in securely deploying and protecting the IPv6 networking infrastructure?

It might already be a foregone conclusion that we have lost the fight in the cyber warfare against the bad actors in the IPv4 stack, but we may still have a fighting chance to win the war in the IPv6 stack. This may be the only chance that we have in order to gain the upper hand to fight against the bad actors in the era of IoT and the next generation of the Internet, especially when considering the fact that we can immediately achieve more than 50% reduction of the cyber security threats and attacks the moment we can turn off the IPv4 stack completely from the current networking infrastructure.

I think the answer to the question is very simple: we MUST lead, in order to survive in the cyber warfare in the days to come.

Disclaimer: The views presented are only personal opinions and they do not necessarily represent those of the U.S. Government.

IPv6, If Not Now, When?!

Current IPv6 Matrix: http://www.ipv6matrix.org/

The overarching issue for IPv6 right now is beyond simply meeting the original OMB mandates - even though they are still very important for those agencies that have not yet met the basic requirements of the FY 2012 and FY 2014 milestones of the OMB mandates, or requesting the vendors who are doing business with the federal government to ensure that their IT related products and services to be in compliance with the FAR stipulations and their legal obligations to do so.

If the vendors’ focus is solely on the short-term profits and ROI, and if they are only interested in short-term gains by keeping exploring the potential loopholes of the regulations and the exceptions for the execution of the federal regulations and mandates, they will always be able to find ways and means to do so. Moreover, if ARIN will keep supporting and facilitating the ideas and practice of the after-depletion IPv4 exchanges among the current IPv4 addresses owners, which could potentially create a very active, perhaps very profitable, IPv4 brokerage business in the private sector, the vendors will definitely take advantage of the opportunities to continue doing so no matter what. This means the IPv6 transition will take a very long time to complete in the U.S. as we own the majority of the IPv4 addresses in the world and many big corporations and large research universities/institutions as well as many federal government agencies still have plenty of IPv4 addresses unused (or used very wisely).

The focus of the discussions for everyone, especially for those in the private sector which is still way behind the curve currently and continues to resist to fully adopt the IPv6 as its primary IP stack for all of its products and services despite of the demand by the federal government as the largest IT customer in this country, should be on the relationship between the critical need for supporting the future development of the Internet and the global adoption of the IPv6 as the vital foundation supporting the future of the Internet. It is a matter whether or not the future of the Internet will be able to survive without IPv6!

If the Internet of Things (IoT) will have anything to do with the Internet, if over 20 or 30 billion devices will be connected to the Internet as many smart people and large think-tanks have repeatedly predicated for the coming years, then there should be NO other choice for everyone but to adopt IPv6 globally in the coming years! This is because IPv4 has only a total of 4.3 billion unique addresses, most of which have already been depleted worldwide, while the IPv6 has 340 undecillion (that's 340 trillion trillion trillion) addresses, which is not only more than enough to support the anticipated 30+ billion IoT devices to be connected to the Internet in the near future but a whole lot more IP addresses that would be needed in the years to come. If nothing else, IPv6 will not only be able to ensure that the IoT will become a reality but also be capable of continuing to support the underlying networking infrastructure upon which IoT will be relying to survive and grow.

The vendors can and will keep sayings that there is no consumer demand for IPv6 or there is no immediate money to be made by transitioning now to IPv6, but there is undoubtedly money to be made from IoT! Most importantly, it is a matter of leadership, vision, and competitive edge for many of the companies in the private sector to consider its survivability in the era of IoT on a much larger global scale.

To me, the smart question on IPv6 should be, if not now, when?!

Disclaimer: The views presented are only personal opinions and they do not necessarily represent those of the U.S. Government.