ReadWriteWeb

The urgent push to move the whole of Internet addresses off of a system never intended to replace telephone, television, and computing simultaneously, and onto the IPv6 address system, is now entering its 13th consecutive blockbuster year. Despite high-level government recommendations for action plans, a global DNS poisoning scare that many say could never have happened under IPv6, and a grass-roots effort to build an actual holiday around the transition, it's estimated that the rate at which the Asia/Pacific region is depleting IPv4 addresses is far outpacing the rate that hosts in that region are moving to IPv6.

It's almost as if everyone wants a real Internet, but too few want to lend a hand in building it. Now the Internet Society, its original non-profit guidance organization, is stepping up its push to make IPv6 more marketable, first with the launch of a new Web site called Deploy360, to be followed up next week with meetings with consumer electronics vendors at CES in Las Vegas.

Baby trashes bar in Las Palmas

One year ago a distributed DNS and content delivery network startup called CloudFlare launched at a TechCrunch event. It didn't win. ReadWriteWeb's Frederic Lardinois wrote about its promise to "speed up your website by an average of 30% and dramatically decrease your bandwidth usage and server load by preventing spam bots and other attackers from reaching your site." He said it had the potential to become a highly disruptive company.

One year later, CloudFlare now says it serves up 15 billion web pages every month to 350 million people. That's a whole lot of people - and it makes a whole lot of things possible. Some of those things began happening this week.

It's an IPv4 world today, but the days of IPv4 are numbered.

As of February 2011, the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) had allocated all remaining public IP address ranges to the five global regional Internet registries. A quick look at this IPv4 Exhaustion Counter below shows a total of 13.24 /8 (8-bit) IPv4 address ranges remaining, for a total of less than 3,400 remaining unallocated IPv4 addresses. Essentially, this means
IPv4 is played out.

The surprising results of an IPv6 census conducted by the Measurement Factory and sponsored by Infoblox are that the lion's share of actual working IPv6 nodes are being hosted by Go Daddy. I know, any excuse to plug their spokesmodel Danica Patrick is shameless, but what is really going on here?

In their census, the number of active IPv6 addresses went from 1.27% of all overall IP addresses in the 2010 sample to 25.4% in the 2011 sample. And more than 80% of the v6 addresses are being hosted by Go Daddy.

Given that many businesses plan to roll out some collection of IPv6 equipment in the next few years, it makes sense to set up your own test lab to ensure that you can understand some of the transition issues and deployment problems early on.

In the sponsored brief Building an Enterprise IPv6 Test Lab Jeff Carrell and Ed Tittel dive into what you need to know to build your own test lab.

Baby trashes bar in Las Palmas

One year ago a distributed DNS and content delivery network startup called CloudFlare launched at a TechCrunch event. It didn't win. ReadWriteWeb's Frederic Lardinois wrote about its promise to "speed up your website by an average of 30% and dramatically decrease your bandwidth usage and server load by preventing spam bots and other attackers from reaching your site." He said it had the potential to become a highly disruptive company.

One year later, CloudFlare now says it serves up 15 billion web pages every month to 350 million people. That's a whole lot of people - and it makes a whole lot of things possible. Some of those things began happening this week.

There is a lot more to IPv6 than just a lot more addresses, including redesigned protocols, better routing, security improvements and finally getting rid of Network Address Translation. In this sponsored brief, How to Prepare for IPv6 Networking by Ed Tittel and Jeff Carrell, they dive into the nuts and bolts of IPv6 and show you what you need to know to start planning your network's transition.

Based on hands-on evaluation of many networking products, the authors will show you what changes you need to make to your networking infrastructure, how you deal with the lack of native IPv6 Internet access, and what particular things you need to upgrade to enable key networking services. There is even a sample case study showing you the time and effort it takes to get IPv6 setup on a typical small business network.

Ed and Jeff are computer industry veterans (Ed has written for us previously) who were former Novell employees, authors and hands-on corporate trainers.

According to a new report from Forrester, 62% of information workers in North America and Europe work remotely. The report says that many clients are approaching the firm for insight on creating best practices for remote, mobile workplaces assuming these changes are part of the remote future when in reality the change is already well underway.

Previously, we looked at some of Forrester's research indicating that as much as 18% of the workforce used their personal smartphones for work, whether they were allowed to or not. That research showed only 29% of workers polled did work outside the office.

Earlier this spring, as anticipated, the last of the IPv4 address blocks was given to the regional Internet registries that dole them out to ISPs and other corporations. Unlike many predictions that go back dozens of years, we have run out of room. Yes, it will take several months before the world is completely run out of address space, and you might be able to find an unused Class C range here or there. But for the most part, you need to get cracking on a transition plan for your company to migrate towards IPv6 now.

Rackspace Vice President of Product, Mark Interrante, announced by e-mail today that Slicehost will be shut down within the next year and migrate its customers to Rackspace Cloud. "With two brands, two control panels and two sets of Support, Engineering and Operations teams it has been a challenge to keep development parity between the products," Interrante writes. The migration to IPv6 and OpenStack are cited as more specific reasons for the move.