Question

The U.S. government has put in place IPv6-compliance mandates to help with the IPv4-to-IPv6 transition. Such mandates require government agencies to have their websites, email and other services available over IPv6.

Let’s consider that you’ve been appointed as the IPv6 transition manager at a relatively small branch of a government agency (e.g., a branch of the Social Security agency in a medium-size town). Your main responsibility is to produce a plan with a timetable for achieving compliance with the IPv6 mandate. The plan should specify the guidelines, solutions, and technologies for supporting IPv6 throughout the agency branch. The plan should include the following, among other things:
Summary of the applicable government IPv6 mandate
Brief description of the networking facility at the branch (LANs, servers, routers, etc.)
Summary of the main IPv6-related RFCs that pertain to the IPv6 support
Cooperation with ISPs and equipment vendors to implement IPv6 support
Summary of the solutions and technologies to be employed in implementing IPv6 (e.g., dual-stack, tunneling, translation)
Timetable for completion of IPv6 transition
Plan for testing the IPv6 compliance in expectation of an audit by the government
The deliverable is a report (in Word) of 6 to 10 pages, excluding the name and biblio pages, with 3 to 5 solid references (APA format), at least. The use of drawings and other graphics is highly recommended.

Answer 1

The U.S. Government has put in place an IPv6 mandate that comes into affect on September 30th. That new mandate requires all government agencies to have their public facing websites and email services available over IPv6.

At this point, it’s not likely that every government website will meet the deadline, though a large number of them will. Christine Schweickert, senior engagement manager for public sector at Akamai, told EnterpriseNetworkingPlanet that she expects over 1,800 U.S Government websites will be on IPv6 by the mandate deadline.

From an Akamai perspective, the company has a large number of U.S. Government customers that it is enabling for IPv6 with dual-stack servers. In a dual-stack implementation, a site is available natively over both IPv4 and IPv6. Akamai’s Content Delivery Network has a mapping technology that optimizes traffic around the Internet. Getting the government websites to run on IPv6 is just a matter of putting the site configuration on the Akamai dual-stack server maps.

“So if a request comes in to a government website from an IPv6 client, we will go ahead and route them to the best performing Akamai Edge server that can speak IPv6 back to that request,” Schweickert explained.

Another approach that some network administrators have tried for IPv6 support has been to tunnel the IPv6 traffic over an IPv4 network, or vice-versa. In Schweickert’s view, that’s not an ideal solution as it tends to break things.“When you’re tunneling, you’re routing through IPv4 packets and that’s not in the spirit that we have to operate in globally,” Schweickert said.

In contrast, Schweickert noted that with dual-stack, the server will respond to IPv4 requests with IPv4 content and to IPv6 requests with IPv6 content. “If you’re using tunneling, you’re really just doing a workaround,” Schweickert said.

To make it even easier for the U.S. Government websites, Akamai isn’t actually charging more money for the dual-stack service either. Schweickert noted that the dual-stack capability is a feature that is already part of the delivery service that Akamai is providing to its U.S Government customers.

David Helms, Vice President, Cyber Security Center of Excellence at Salient Federal Solutions is among those that are backers of the Akamai approach to meeting the September 30th IPv6 mandate. In his view, it’s all about enabling interesting services and locations over IPv6 in order to spur adoption.