Monday, July 19, 2004
Our 8600 will do IPv6
While John Stevens was in the USA, he went to a Nortel Networks conference in Los
Angeles. One of the useful things that came out of this conference was that
John managed to put me in touch with some of the R&D people at Nortel.
This morning I got e-mail from Ian Jones at Nortel enquiring about our
interest in IPv6 on the
Passport
8600 routing switch. Rhodes has two of these switches (soon to be
three :) which together form the core of Rhodes's network. They're quite
nice switches but, to date, they've had absolutely no support for IPv6.
We've tried to find out about IPv6 on the 8600 through the usual channels but we've never got a
decent answer from them. They've always told us that they thought IPv6
should be supported, but have never been able to tell us where we can get
IPv6 capable firmware. Nortel R&D came up with a far more useful answer.
It appears that the problem with IPv6 and the 8600 platform is that the
management blades we're using do all their IPv4 routing in hardware. This
means that we get wire-speed IPv4 but that changing the IP version is
difficult. We can't run IPv6 using the IPv4 hardware, which means it has to
happen in software (read slower).
Nortel initially told us they were going to release a new version of the
management blade that did IPv6 at wire-speed. While they're still planing
to do this, they have "technology preview" release of the code they're going
to use on in. This implements all the IPv6 features in software, while
still doing IPv4 in hardware. They tell us it has limited IPv6 features,
but should do the sorts of things we're currently doing with IPv6.
They're prepared to give us a copy of this code so that we can experiment.
The initial plan is to run IPv6 capable firmware on the 8600 in Hamilton
building and see how it goes. If it seems stable there, and if the
IPv4 side of things doesn't lose any of the functionality we're currently
using, we'll consider running it on Rhodes's core.
With IPv6 on the Hamilton 8600, we'll be able to IPv6 enable several parts
of Rhodes's network straight away. These include all of Hamilton building
(being the CS and IS departments), RUCUS, the 802.11 wireless networks, and
some of the remote access networks provided out of that building. This is
in addition to Rhodes's backbone, which is already running IPv6.
Add to that the fact that Rhodes's IPv6 prefix (2001:548:1010::/48) is being
advertised by the Internet Solution
(courtesy of bje) and we have
real world IPv6 routing for most of Rhodes in the not-to-distant future.
posted by guy at: 11:05 SAST |
path: /systems |
permanent link
