Cerf Vint - IPv6 Essentials

Silvia easily distills complexity out of IPv6 to make it accessible to everyone.

Latif LadidPresident, International IPv6 Forum

The best vendor-independent IPv6 book available: unpretentious, casual, and powerful.

Joe KleinCEO Disrupt6, and Security SME for the IPv6 Forum

Silvias ability to capture IPv6 in such detail while considering the business and market drivers really sets the stage for deployment, discovery, and innovation. IPv6 Essentials is a go-to resource for all of our students and employees, providing a foundation for the next generation of engineers.

Erica JohnsonDirector, University of New Hampshire InterOperability Lab

As IPv6 enters mainstream deployment around the world, IPv6 Essentials is more essential than ever. This update contains critical new information for any network professional involved in transitioning a network from IPv4 to IPv6.

Mark TownsleyCisco Fellow

It is no exaggeration to say that the Internet has become an integral part of the lives of nearly three billion people on the planet. More important, it touches nearly everyone thanks to the ramifications of transactions, information exchange, and other Internet-based applications that produce indirect effects. The original Internet Protocol provided for a maximum of 4.3 billion terminal identifiers (addresses). This limit was stretched using a mechanism called Network Address Translation that permitted multiple parties to use private address space that would not be exposed in the public Internet but rather translated into a shared, publicly routable IPv4 address. The IPv4 address space was exhausted at the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) in February 2011, leaving Regional Internet Registries to deal with the allocation of their remaining address space. IPv6 was developed in the mid-1990s and standardized by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). It has provision for 340 trillion trillion trillion addresses. Its implementation has been slow, but two milestones are triggering an increased rate of uptake. One is the running out of the IPv4 address space. The other is the growing demand for Internet addresses to be assigned to mobiles, set-top boxes, automobiles, and literally tens of billions of other programmable devices. This is the so-called Internet of Things .

In addition to satisfying what will become an insatiable demand for address space, IPv6 has features that improve the Internet Protocol format for easier processing and provides for additional functionality in the way of configuration convenience and flow management, among other useful properties. Readers will find this book an easily approached guide to IPv6 implementation. That IPv6 must coexist for an uncertain period of time with IPv4 is a given, so attention is drawn to so-called dual-stack implementations. A thorough implementation of IPv6, however, must also demonstrate that the implementation can operate in a pure IPv6 environment in addition to coping with a mixed IPv4/IPv6 environment.

Like many exponential phenomena, IPv6 may well come to surprise us. It has been many years since its development, but there is indication that it is approaching 3% of traffic on the Internet. While this seems very small, it will grow rapidly if history is any guide, presuming continued compounding growth of need for the larger address space.

Anyone serious about making a career in Internet-related applications and services will be wise to become familiar with this new protocol and its functionality and capability. You have this opportunity before you in Silvia Hagens work.

This book is about the next-generation Internet Protocol. We have become familiar with the strengths and weaknesses of IPv4; we know how to design and configure it, and we have learned how to troubleshoot it. And now we have to learn a new protocol? Start from scratch? Not really. The designers of IPv6 have learned a lot from over 15 years of experience with IPv4, and they have been working on the new protocol since the early 1990s. They retained the strengths of IPv4, extended the address space from 32 bits to 128 bits, and added functionality that is missing in IPv4. They developed transition mechanisms that make IPv4 and IPv6 coexist peacefully and that guarantee a smooth transition between the protocols. In fact, this was one of the major requirements for the development of the new protocol version.

So you do not need to forget what you know about IPv4; many things will feel familiar with IPv6. When you get started, you will discover new features and functionalities that will make your life a lot easier. IPv6 has features that you will need in tomorrows networksfeatures that IPv4 does not provide.

One of the cool features built into IPv6 is the Stateless Autoconfiguration capability. Havent we always struggled with IP address assignment? The advent of DHCP made our lives easier, but now we need to maintain and troubleshoot DHCP servers. And when our refrigerator, swimming pool, and heating system as well as our smartphones and the TV set each have IP addresses, will we need a DHCP server at home? Not with Stateless Autoconfiguration. If you have an IPv6-enabled host, you can plug it into your network, and it will configure automatically for a valid IPv6 address. ICMP (Internet Control Message Protocol), which is a networkers best friend, has become much more powerful with IPv6. Many of the new features of IPv6, such as Stateless Autoconfiguration, optimized multicast routing and multicast group management, Neighbor Discovery, Path MTU Discovery, and Mobile IPv6, are based on ICMPv6.

I hope that this book will help you to become familiar with the protocol and provide an easy-to-understand entry point and guide to exploring this new area.