Google Deploys IPv6 For Internal Network 260
itwbennett writes "Google is four years into a project to roll out IPv6 to its entire internal employee network. At the Usenix Large Installation System Administration (LISA) conference in Boston last week, Google network engineer Irena Nikolova shared some lessons others can learn from Google's experience. For example: It requires a lot of work with vendors to get them to fix buggy and still-unfinished code. 'We should not expect something to work just because it is declared supported,' the paper accompanying the presentation concluded."
Supported (Score:5, Insightful)
"'We should not expect something to work just because it is declared supported,' the paper accompanying the presentation concluded."
I think that if something is declared "supported", it is perfectly reasonable to expect it to work. If it turns out it doesn't work, I think the problem is more that the vendor hasn't done as good a job as they should have than that your expectations were too high.
Re:IPv6 (Score:5, Insightful)
assignment of smaller blocks may have extended the life of IPv4 addresses however, there are physically not enough addresses for the devices we currently have. While, there may be enough at the moment, there wont be soon.
What is IPv4; 4.3 billion addresses. There are over 6 billion people on earth and many people in the western world have numerous devices. My household of 2 has 8 devices that are nearly always online. (Computers, Phones, Top-set Boxes, printers, etc....) This number does not take into account either one of our work sites which probably add another 1-2 addresses to that number.
And no, NAT is not a solution.
Re:IPv6 (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Supported (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't think they meant "we shouldn't hold the vendors accountable if the equipment doesn't work right".
I think they meant "we shouldn't expect that just because the vendor says it works, that it does".
Google has the benefit of size. If Google calls up Cisco and say "please fix this problem that exists in the thousands of routers we buy from you", it'll get fixed. If you or I call up Linksys and say "please fix this problem that exists in this one router I bought from you"... well... don't hold your breath.
Re:The fine article is wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
Uhm, it's obvious something dropped <sup> tags. Just like, for example, Slashdot does.
Try this: 2<sup>80</sup> -> 280. Not the writer's fault, the blame lies on editors who didn't notice their software mutilates basic harmless tags.
Re:What Vendors? (Score:3, Insightful)
Every vendor is short on delivery.
The only reason they have some support is because of the U.S. Federal Government mandate that all vendors support basic IPv6 by (i forget the year its somewhere between 2008 and 2012)
Now, that doesnt mean its a comprehensive solution (those cost even more development dollars). They simply did the least amount of work needed to still sell the product to the government.
It wont be until the rest of us demand proper support any vendor will put the time and money into a proper solution
Re:Supported (Score:5, Insightful)
I think that if something is declared "supported", it is perfectly reasonable to expect it to work. If it turns out it doesn't work, I think the problem is more that the vendor hasn't done as good a job as they should have than that your expectations were too high.
Indeed, but it's the same with all commodity technology - you find various implementations, not all of which work properly.
The same was true 10 or 15 years ago with booting from CD. Same was true 5-6 years ago with PXE. Same's true with CIDR - I've come across equipment like printers that can't handle the idea - you have to give them a class A, B or C subnet mask. Same with STP (spanning tree) - I've met switches that just plain don't work if you turn on STP then plug in a cheapie unmanaged switch - and I don't mean the port plugged into the cheapie switch doesn't work, I mean the entire expensive managed switch doesn't work. Only a couple of weeks ago I met a server BIOS providing software RAID (yeuch) that needed the drives set to RAID in the BIOS for it to work. But if power to the server was lost, that specific BIOS setting would go. Every other BIOS setting would be just fine and you'd get no error at bootup; you'd just find your disks magically appeared differently on boot.
If Google's network team honestly thought that any product with "IPv6 supported" on the label meant "Every aspect of IPv6 fully supported, tested, interoperable with other vendor's implementation - basically it'll work as well as you'd expect IPv4 to work in something released in the last five years", they're displaying incredible naiveté.
It took Google 4 years... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Vendors (Score:5, Insightful)
Because the hardware that can handle large amounts of small packets fast when you install your own software ('firmware'), does not exist AFAIK. Atleast not the type which will also be supported by (multiple) vendors (no1 wants to be stuck on, locked into, one vendor). designing not-massproduced ASICS isn't cheap. It would be like Google designing their own CPU's for their servers.
The closest things are:
- NetFPGA (some people at Google worked on that project I believe) / LibreRouter - which use FPGA's to handle packets, you tell it how to do that.
- projects like Netmap, handle packets in userspace so you don't have to push packets through the kernel on normal PC-hardware, making it faster: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SPtoXNW9yEQ [youtube.com]
The best chance currently to be useful in 'doing your own thing' is probalby:
- OpenFlow, which basically is an API standard which multiple vendors would support to describe what the hardware in a switch should be doing, a programming language almost. Some demo's:
http://www.youtube.com/user/stanfordopenflow [youtube.com]
Which can allow for lots of tricks, like 'software defined networking'
Re:IPv6 (Score:5, Insightful)
you see, the good thing is not the NAT, but the firewall dropping packets from outside, again. As always, the people say the security comes from NAT, and really mean the requirement of having a firewall which drops packets coming in, because there is no mapping to which internal ip they should be routed.
Re:IPv6 (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Supported (Score:4, Insightful)
On the other hand not supporting or working with a customer like Google in their move to IPv6 would be short sighted. If Google were not happy with Cisco's attitude they could easily go an invest in another company and publicize why they dropped Cisco. That would hurt Cisco down the road as they end up no longer being taken seriously.
Companies know that IPv6 is going to become a reality sooner rather than later, especially in markets such as east Asia and Africa, which already have a rapidly diminishing pool of available IPv4 addresses. To ignore these markets would be handing future success over to companies who recognized the expanding niche and got in there early.
Re:IPv6 (Score:4, Insightful)
NAT killed one of the basic principles of the internet and you're trying to make it look like a good thing.
Re:Supported (Score:4, Insightful)
And funnily enough - it's way more easier for Linksys/D-Link/Netgear to fix a bug or implement a feature on a SOHO device than it is for Cisco - not only they don't have to care about the installed base, but their customer base is used to sub-par firmware - so were they to implement an IPv6 feature in a buggy or less-than-optimal way . . . not that much of backslash.
That is exactly why this story is news. If it had been SOHO routers being buggy - well, that's sad, but it's not likely to surprise the /. readership. If it had been "professional equipment" not supporting IPv6, I don't think that would have surprised a whole lot of us, either.
The news here is that vendors who you might expect to deliver quality product shipped appliances that they claimed would support IPv6, and that the IPv6 support is shoddy. Now, some people will not be surprised by this, either (I'm not, for one), but some people will be - as you neatly illustrated by pointing out that people hold Cisco to higher standards than SOHO gear.
Re:IPv6 (Score:4, Insightful)
Thank the internet-based attacks. I've had the pleasure of plugging in a fresh Windows XP (before SP3/firewall) computer to get security updates and have it infected 30 some odd seconds later.
IPV6 is inevitable - better learn it now (Score:3, Insightful)
Right now I'm running a free IP v6-over-v4 tunnel from my router to Hurricane Electric. I got assigned my own v6 LAN range. Mac OS X works fine, hits the v6 version of a website if it exists, the v4 version otherwise. Doesn't always work, I know. The DNS part is the problem to figure out. The larger infrastructure DNS servers (comcast, at&t, verizon, etc) need to support IPv6. Comcast has just begun rolling it out to end users, so hopefully they've got dnsv6 servers that work now and still return the correct regionally sorted IP addresses for cloud services like akamai.
Re:IPv6 (Score:4, Insightful)
You've got to be kidding. Were you just looking for some way to criticize his post?