For those boarding the IPv6 train

Akamai will provide a real-time data visualization of IPv6 Web traffic served from its global platform during World IPv6 Day.

Some details, courtesy of Akamai spokesperson Andy Champagne:

The Akamai visualization is designed to show the pattern of traffic served during the 24-hour period (from midnight to midnight Greenwich Mean Time.

Akamai’s participation includes IPv6-enabling www.akamai.com, as well as supporting over 30 customers from around the globe that have opted in to Akamai’s IPv6 technology platform.

Interest — and some anxiety — is high over this exercise. As my Network World colleague Carolyn Duffy Marsan wrote:

Hundreds of popular websites — including Google, Facebook, Yahoo and Bing — are participating in a 24-hour trial of a new Internet standard called IPv6 on June 8, prompting worries that hackers will exploit weaknesses in this emerging technology to launch attacks.

Sign up today.

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On the NAISG Tech Tips email discussion board this morning, I see a people digging deep into IPv6 in an effort to understand the implications and benefits of deployments in their environments.

One fellow wrote:

I ran across an article which mirrored my own experiences with IPv6 presentations. These presentations all say I won’t need NAT anymore. I don’t understand why they say this like NAT is a bad thing. This article had the same question I have always had. Why would I want to walk away from NAT. Do they mean I should put every device I have directly on the internet?

I can see that an ISP might get excited about the prospect of renting thousands or hundreds of thousands of more addresses. I don’t work for an ISP. Besides the profit angle is there something I am just not getting? I know that some of the network protection features either need or work better with IPv6 but that doesn’t mean I have to or want to externalize all my machine does it?

To that, someone responded:

From what I’ve read about IPv6, the design of IPv6 negates the need for NAT. This goes the same for DHCP; not necessary. Just because your device has an IPv6 address, doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s externalized.

There are a lot of things I don’t understand as well about IPv6, so I hope to gain some knowledge as it becomes more widely used.

Keep an eye on this and other security forums throughout World IPv6 Day as everyone gets a much better sense of what they need to do before the real deployments begin.

–Bill Brenner