Hurricane Electric are a large tier two IP transit provider who have set themselves apart from others (including all tier ones) by leading the charge on the IPv6 front. They offer a number of great services besides IP transit including free IPv6 to IPv4 tunnels for those without IPv6 enabled ISPs [1] and an IPv6 certification program (I’m a sage apparently!).
Martin Levy is their Director of IPv6 Strategy and he gave a very interesting talk on the current state of IPv6 at the most recent INEX Members’ Meeting. It was during this talk that I decided that after configuring so much IPv6 for customers, it was time to get the finger out and sort out our own IPv6 network.
We’ve had IPv6 over imag!ne‘s DSL service in the office for about a year now since we set that up as a proof of concept. What I needed to do was look at our PoP which manages a lot of our internal services such as web, email, VPN, DNS and some customer boxes.
As it stands, we now have a fully dual stacked network:
- IPv6 glue records for name servers answering for opensolutions.ie thanks to the good folks at Blacknight prodding the good folks at the IEDR (this is of course essential if you don’t want your IPv6 services to rely on IPv4 DNS!);
- our DNS server (bind9) working on IPv6 with configured records for web, DNS and mail;
- our main website (www.opensolutions.ie) running on IPv6;
- our SMTP server (Postfix) running on IPv6 (and we immediately saw a lot of v6 traffic from mailing lists such as CSP, NANOG, and so forth);
- our POP3 and IMAP server (Dovecot) running on IPv6;
- and lots of ancillary tools such as SSH, ip6tables, etc; and
- naturally, we’ve added IPv6 monitoring of all of these services from our remote Nagios implementation.
It’s a job that’s been hanging over me for a long time and I’m delighted it’s finally done.
If you or your company want to get started with IPv6, please contact us. At time of writing, IPv4 exhaustion is predicted to occur in only 241 days (see the widget to the right for an up to date prediction).
[1] Unfortunately HE don’t have any PoPs in Ireland. If you want an IPv6 tunnel and are in Ireland, head over to SixXS and choose HEAnet or Airwire as your end point as they’re both in Ireland and both members of INEX so you can be assured the lowest possible latency.
UPDATE 2010-10-05: Until now, we only had one IPv6 glue record but we have since upgraded the other third party DNS servers answering for opensolutions.ie and now all name servers have v6 glue records.