On Sunday, December 05, 2010 06:50:44 am Rudi Ahlers wrote: > Seeing as IPV4 is near it's end of life > (http://www.internetnews.com/infra/article.php/3915471/IPv4+Nearing+Final+Days.htm), > I'm curios as who know whether everyone is ready for the changeover to > IPV6? > > Is anyone using it in production already, and what are your experiences with it? IPv4 will likely continue to work even long past available address exhaustion. What will break is access from your non-IPv6 machine to IPv6 only sites. Well, that's already broken, but as new sites and eyeballs come online, there will be IPv4 only users (and sites) that will no longer be reachable from the 'whole Internet' (talk about an oxymoron!). As to NAT, well, IPv6 does have the equivalent non-public-routable address space, and, yes, there is a NAT66 out there, just not available from all vendors (and yes, lots of people are protesting up a storm). NAT is not going to go away, sorry, as there are enough people wanting it to give financial incentive for vendors to provide it, whether anyone thinks it's misguided or not. Read the NANOG archives for the last year and see for yourself how well or ill prepared the people who actually run the 'Internet' in North America are. So yes you need an IPv6 strategy, and yes there are ways to keep devices on your network invisible from outside your network; RFC 4193 "Unique Local IPv6 Unicast Addresses" covers it. For a ULA addressed device to get to the IPv6 Internet will require either a NAT66 device or an ALG (proxy) and is the recommended way to do things that RFC1918 addresses are commonly used for in IPv4. In watching this thread I had to pinch myself and remind myself that I wasn't reading NANOG by mistake; had to check the folder and the incoming mail rules, too.... :-)