Voicing thoughts about IPv6
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I didn't know if this post should be posted here ,or in the IPv6 forum.
I am kinda old school at this stage of the game.
I thought "When in the world will we/I ever need to utilize IPv6".
OK. Advent of Ipads.Ipods,Smart Phones,and on and on.We are a K-12 school with three buildings in the mix. I wondered when this would start happening. Sure enough there have been a few days in the last couple weeks we have run out of Ip's on a couple of the subnets.
Our "main" building actually has three subnets( besides a subnet for servers only, and yet another subnet for teachers and admins pc's) We have all plug and play switches so (for now) Vlanning is out of the question. Not thinking about this scenario out enough,what ends up happening if a kid is carrying an Ipod in his/her pocket,it not only eats an ip address in the "elementary' subnet ,when they walk to the other end of the building it also eats up an ip at that end of the building,high school.
We have 1000 students so needless to say this can become a problem and will more and more.
I know the dhcp lease times could be jockeyed but bottom line as long at the device is turned on that device will just grab yet another ip address in that 'x' amount of time.I mentioned this in another post,that I see little kindergarten kids with 2-3 devices strapped on,,,necklaced on etc.and several of them,,I know for a fact their folks don't have two nickels to rub together but they have each of their kids an smart phone or something to keep them occupied so the folks don't have to deal with them at home.
I am mentioning this as I am not sure how many if any are seriously trying to get setup for ipv6? As I understand the pfSense dev's aren't really pursuing this a lot in v-2.0 of pfSense. I am sure this scenario would not be affected by most all that use pfSense but is for sure,something to keep in mind.
I have to say that the three pfSense-1.2.3-RELEASE machines I setup at three different school buildings,are working rock solid. Thank You to all at the pfSense 'trenches' who actually make the pfSense package work as a real turnkey router!
Thanks,
Barry -
Why not allocate more addresses to your subnets? There are over 65000 address in 192,168.0.0/16 and over 16 million in 10.0.0.0/8.
Why not (for example) use 192.168.0.0/18, 192.168.64.0/18, 192.168.128.0/18 (over 16,000 addresses each) 192.168.192.0/18 for further subdivision and future expansion (e.g 192.168.192.0/24 for servers, 192.168.193.0/24 for teachers's and admin PCs etc).
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The pfSense developers have indicated that IPV6 will be a priority for pfSense 2.1. As you can tell, a couple of the developers have already made some initial efforts. Its coming.
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Why not allocate more addresses to your subnets? There are over 65000 address in 192,168.0.0/16 and over 16 million in 10.0.0.0/8.
Why not (for example) use 192.168.0.0/18, 192.168.64.0/18, 192.168.128.0/18 (over 16,000 addresses each) 192.168.192.0/18 for further subdivision and future expansion (e.g 192.168.192.0/24 for servers, 192.168.193.0/24 for teachers's and admin PCs etc).
I can't speak for brcisna but most school network environments use Public IP Subnets instead of Private IP Subnets. So I'm thinking that is why they are running out of IPs.
The company I work for, we used to use Public IPs for our internal servers but over the last 3 years we have moved them to 10.x.x.x and re-use the public ip for any internet facing servers.. Then again Public IP space for my company isnt running low yet
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If, as a school, you can get IPv6 provided to your facility by your ISP it's pretty easy at that point to get up and running.
You can build a IPv6 router next to your existing IPv4 router, so even if the router is connected to the same physical network it's pretty easy to setup.
I currently have a IPv6 carp cluster setup in the Xs4all Datacenter that routes native IPv6 to our webserver, mailserver and primary nameserver.
I am currently running my IPv6 version of 2.0 there. It's a work in progress but it'll route your traffic fine. Firewall rules and basic stateless autoconfig already work.
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Why not allocate more addresses to your subnets? There are over 65000 address in 192,168.0.0/16 and over 16 million in 10.0.0.0/8.
Why not (for example) use 192.168.0.0/18, 192.168.64.0/18, 192.168.128.0/18 (over 16,000 addresses each) 192.168.192.0/18 for further subdivision and future expansion (e.g 192.168.192.0/24 for servers, 192.168.193.0/24 for teachers's and admin PCs etc).
I can't speak for brcisna but most school network environments use Public IP Subnets instead of Private IP Subnets. So I'm thinking that is why they are running out of IPs.
The company I work for, we used to use Public IPs for our internal servers but over the last 3 years we have moved them to 10.x.x.x and re-use the public ip for any internet facing servers.. Then again Public IP space for my company isnt running low yet
Many higher ed institutions already have IPv6 allocations, it's simply a matter of architecting and deploying. Generally most have been too apathetic about IPv6 and now everyone is behind and scrambling to figure it out and port their old tools to support it and begging for money to upgrade infrastructure to do IPv6. It's really not that hard, especially for anyone that has done another protocol in addition to IPv4. For a long time our IPv6 path wasn't the same as v4, nor does it need to be, as its a totally different protocol.
Internet2 has a workshop that they put on (that I have been an instructor for in the past) that teaches v6 deployment / theory, etc. to networking folks.