Inline - -Hammer-
"I was a normal American nerd" -Jack Herer 1) (This one is currently a personal issue) I am still building up a true IPv6 skillset. Yes, I understand it for the most part but now is the time to apply it. Frankly, IMHO, the best way to build up a truly useful IPv6 skill set is to start applying what you don't know and see what happens. For the most part, you will find that it is truly "96 more bits, no magic". ------- Completely agree. Been playing in GNS3 on the basics and we're starting to play in a full lab soon.
2) All the reading you do doesn't prepare you for application and the vendors aren't necessarily helping. Feature parity across platforms and vendors beyond just "interface x/x/x" and "ipv6 address fe80:blah:blah::babe:1" seems to seriously be lacking. When I try to take what I understand and apply it beyond the basics I often see hurdles. Example? HSRP IPv6 global addressing on Cisco ASR platform. If it's working for you hit me offline. Example2? Any vendor product beyond a router or switch. CheckPoint FW? F5 LB? Netscaler LB or AF? The WAN guys may be rolling deep in IPv6 but not everyone else. I just got an EA this morning from CheckPoint for NAT66. This should have been ready for prime time years ago. I guess the vendors weren't getting the push from the customers so there was no need to make an effort....
You probably meant 2001:db8:b1aa:b1aa::babe:1 (blah isn't hex and fe80::/10 is link local. 2001:db8::/16 is the example prefix) ------- I stand corrected. :) For the most part, HSRP really isn't even necessary or useful in IPv6 since ND should take care of what HSRP did for IPv4. ------- On the WAN? Sure. On my Internet facing equipment? I disagree. RAs and ND and all that fun stuff needs to be suppressed.
I believe F5 has rolled out IPv6 in a subset of their products and that you need pretty recent versions to get IPv6 functionality from them. The ARIN Wiki (http://www.getipv6.info) may be a good source of information on various vendor statuses. Contribute what you know/find out there as well, please. ------- Yes they have and NetScaler is running solid as well. My issues are when you go beyond basic features of any product with IPv6 things get tricky. I need content switching with redirects and whatnot and based on the few efforts I've seen so far I'm not optimistic. Again, routers and switches seem to be further ahead than other products. They all have their limits in advanced features. Back to my ASR comment.
Why would you want NAT66? ICK!!! One of the best benefits of IPv6 is being able to eliminate NAT. NAT was a necessary evil for IPv4 address conservation. It has no good use in IPv6. -------That is clearly a matter of opinion. NAT64 and NAT66 wouldn't be there if there weren't enough customers asking for it. Are all the customers naive? I doubt it. They have their reasons. I agree with your "purist" definition and did not say I was using it. My point is that vendors are still rolling out baseline features even today.
3) When I'm not preoccupied attempting to digest the fundamentals I am well aware of the retooling of the brain that is required for this in a network design. Last year I reached out to Team Cymru and attempted to build an IPv6 router template to match their IPv4 template. It was a completely different animal. Ironically most of the STIGs and NSA reference garbage I used was ten years old but still applied. After going thru all those docs my brain hurt trying to orient my ACLs properly and go thru all the different attributes you want to block where and when. Then I spent some time trying to work our design schemas for our ARIN space with the WAN design team. What I'm trying to say is that Roberts comments are spot on. It is a very different way of thinking on a small scale and a large scale and you can't take your IPv4 logic and apply it. I've tried and it's just slowing me down.
Yes and no. If you have been doing IPv4 long enough to remember pre-NAT IPv4, then, you just need to remember some of the old ways of IPv4. If you have no recollection of IPv4 without NAT, then, you are correct, it is a huge paradigm shift to go back to the way the internet is supposed to have been before we ran out of addresses. ------- This isn't specific to you Owen, but the group in general. I have been around for a while. Not as long as some others here. NAT is a feature and it does have a place. Security. I'm sorry that this frustrates people but security is a layered approach and it starts off simple. If you have a network that doesn't need exposure to the Internet or to someone else you can get fancy with anything from a FW to control source and destination or AD controls so only the accounting team can get in. Sure. They all work. You can also NAT them. Make them invisible. Or null the traffic. The more fundamental the point of defense is the easier it is to understand and sometimes the more difficult it becomes to bypass. Complex security adds a greater potential for vulnerabilities. If you want to protect your car stereo you could lock a cover over it right? But if you could, wouldn't you also just lock the car doors when you leave it? I'm not going to tell you that NAT guarantees you anything. We all know nothing is foolproof. But it is a fundamental feature that works for that purpose. Do I plan on NATting our edge Internet traffic? No. Not for IPv6. Because the protocol was not designed for it. But have I ruled it out as an option for some environments? No. Bring on the flames. I know this is going to get people stirred up. I promise not to ignore the thread....
