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IPv6 Turns 20, Did You Notice?
IPv6 is 20 years old and the milestone has been celebrated with 10 percent adoption across the world for the first time.
The idea that IPv6 remains so far behind its saturated incumbent, IPv4, is horrifying given that three continents ran out of IPv4 addresses in 2015. Unfortunately, because the product isn’t ‘end of life’ most internet providers have been working on a ‘not broken, don’t fix it’ basis.
But 2016 looks to be the year when IPv6 makes its great leap to the mainstream, in Britain at least. BT, the UK’s biggest broadband provider, has already committed to switch on IPv6 support by the end of the year, and most premises will be IPv6-capable by April. Most companies use the same lines, but it will be up to each individual supplier to switch over. Plusnet, a part of BT, is a likely second.
IPv6 has a number of advantages over IPv4, most notably that it is virtually infinite, meaning that the capacity problems that the expanded network is facing shouldn’t come back to haunt us again. It will also pave the way for ever faster, more secure networks.
Some private corporate networks have already made the switch. Before Christmas we reported that the UK Ministry of Defence was already using the protocol, leaving thousands of unused IPv4 addresses lying idle in its wake.
IPv6 is also incredibly adaptable for the Internet of Things. Version 4.2 of the Bluetooth protocol includes IPv6 connectivity as standard, making it a lot easier for tiny nodes to make up a larger internet-connected grid.
Google’s latest figures suggest that more than 10 percent of users are running IPv6 connections at the weekend, while the number drops to eight percent on weekdays. This suggests that the majority of movement towards IPv6 is happening in the residential broadband market.
That said, it is imperative that businesses begin to make the leap. As Infoblox IPv6 evangelist Tom Coffeen told us last year, it could start to affect the speed at which you are able to trade.
“If someone surfs onto your site and its only available in IPv4, but they are using IPv6, there has to be some translation, which puts your site at a disadvantage. If I’ve not made my site available in IPv6, I’m no longer in control over where that translation occurs.”
In other words, if you don’t catch up, you will soon get left behind. It was ever thus.
Courtesy-TheInq
ARM And Nokia Want To Update The TCP/IP Stack
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Nokia and ARM want to spruce up the TCP/IP stack to make it better suited to networks that need to operate at high speed and/or low latency.
Legacy TCP/IP is seen as one of the slowing points for a lot of future IT – particularly 5G. LTE was IP-based but it was hell on toast getting it to go and as networks get faster and more virtualised, the TCP/IP stack is failing to keep up.
At the moment Nokia and ARM are using 5G to drive other companies into looking at a
fully revamped TCP/IP stack, optimized for the massively varied use cases of the next mobile generation, for cloud services, and for virtualization and software-defined networking (SDN).
Dubbed the OpenFastPath (OFP) Foundation, founded by Nokia Networks, ARM and industrial IT services player Enea. The cunning plan is to create an open source TCP/IP stack which can accelerate the move towards SDN in carrier and enterprise networks.
AMD, Cavium, Freescale, HPE and the ARM-associated open source initiative, Linaro are all on board with it.
The cunning plan is to create open but secure network applications, which harness IP packet processing. Some want very high throughput, others ultra-low latency others want both and it is probably going to require a flexible standard to make it all go
The standard would support faster packet forwarding, via low IP latency combined with high capacity, and so reduce deployment and management costs by making networks more efficient.
This appears to be based around getting TCP/IP out of the kernel and using them for packet processing involves a number of operations (moving packets into memory, then to the kernel, then back out to the interface) which could be streamlined to reduce latency.
Courtesy-Fud
Cisco Hits 50 Million Milestone For Its IP Phones
April 26, 2012 by admin
Filed under Around The Net
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Cisco Wednesday announced Wednesday that it has sold its 50 millionth IP phone, a significant increase in just two years when 30 million were sold.
The switching technology giant today also said it will make software for presence, instant messaging and Cisco Jabber IM clients available for free to its Unified Communications Manager customers.
The latter move means organizations with UCM can roll out presence and IM to employees simply and cheaply to smartphones and tablets running various operating systems, Barry O’Sullivan, senior vice president of Cisco’s voice technology group, said in a blog post.
The supported OSs include Windows, Mac, iPad, Cisco Cius, iPhone, BlackBerry and, later in 2012, Android, O’Sullivan said.
The move helps companies “deploy a unified communications client that is BYOD-ready,” he added. BYOD refers to Bring Your Own Device, a trend where companies allow workers to use devices of their choosing to connect to company data wirelessly.
Microsoft and Others Enable IPv6
The so-called worldwide launch of IPv6 has been set for 6 June 2012, when companies will permanently enable IPv6 connectivity in their products and services.
Following the relative success of 2011′s IPv6 day, a number of firms including Cisco, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo have pledged support for “World IPv6 Launch” day, which has been set as 6 June 2012. On that day the companies have pledged to permanently enable IPv6 connectivity to their associated products and services.
IP address allocation bodies such as ARIN and RIPE have been pushing IPv6 adoption for years but it took last year’s dramatic exhaustion of IPv4 addresses to jolt companies into action. IPv6 day was supported by many of the firms taking part in the IPv6 launch later this year, to drum up awareness and see how much disruption there will be when IPv6 connectivity is enabled.
Daniel Karrenberg, chief scientist at RIPE NCC said, “Operational experience and measurements on World IPv6 Launch will help content providers and ISPs to identify and rectify any potential problems with delivering services over IPv6.”
VoIP Ideal Platform For Controlling Botnets
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Botnets and their masters can communicate with one other by calling into the same VoIP conference call and exchanging data using touch tones, researchers demonstrated at Defcon.
This gives the botmasters — whose top goals include remaining anonymous — the ability to issue orders from random payphones and disposable cellular phones, say researchers Itzik Kotler and Iftach Ian Amit of security and risk-assessment firm Security Art.
Using phones and the public phone networks eliminates one of the prime tools bot fighters have: taking down the domains of botnets’ command and control servers, the researchers say. If the botmaster isn’t using a command and control server, it can’t be taken down.
In fact, the botmaster can communicate with the zombie machines that make up the botnet without using the Internet at all if the zombies are within a corporate network. So even if a victim company’s VoIP network is segregated from the data network, there is still a connection to the outside world.
In addition to its stealth, the VoIP tactic employs technology that readily pierces corporate firewalls and uses only traffic that is difficult for data loss prevention software to peer into. The traffic is streamed audio, so data loss prevention scanners can’t recognize patterns of data they are supposed to filter, the researchers say.
The downsides of VoIP as a command channel are that it severely limits the number of zombie machines that can be contacted at once, and the rate at which stolen data can be sent out of a corporate network is limited by the phone system. But Kotler and Amit say the connections are plenty big to send commands in.
During their demo at the conference, the pair had an Asterisk open source IP PBX stand in as the corporate PBX. A virtual machine representing a zombie computer on a corporate network called via TCP/IP through the PBX and into a corporate conference call. A BlackBerry, representing the botmaster dialed in over the public phone network to the same conference call.