These are the minutes of the IPv6 Business Information Exchange meeting held on October 21, 2008.

• Any answers found to questions / issues raised in last meeting. The items from the last meeting are as follows:


• Q: What plans does ARIN have to take back IPv4 addresses?
  A: ARIN says there is no policy in effect to do this. This is a rumor.
  


• Q: What kind of IPv6 assignment should be asked for from ARIN? /48? Higher?
  A: /48 is an “extra-small” assignment from ARIN. No end user has been given a /32. We looked at: http://www.sixxs.net/tools/grh/dfp/arin/ This has statistics on usage and also what prefixes have been asked for.
  
  From looking at this site:
  • It appears that there is not much real enforcement of the nominal restrictions of larger ranges to ISPs.
  • It appears that the number of organizations getting IPv6 address ranges is running far ahead of the number actually doing anything with them. Many installations may be starting to consider when to get ready.


• Do we have any statistics on IPv6? The issues of concern are:
  
  
  • Q: How much IPv6 is travelling over the Internet?
    A: On the Sixxs site there appears to be a report on IPv6 traffic by country. (Netherlands highest, followed by Germany and then the US. Asia lagging way behind.) This was not what people on the call would have expected.
  
  
  • Q: How many security violations have there been for IPv6?
    A: As far as security violations:
    
    
    • CERT is not tracking numbers of IPv6 attacks by protocol type. They do have information on types of attacks and on vulnerabilities. Just not on numbers of attacks.
    
    
    • It appears that the requirement for IPSec under IPv6 does not mean all packets MUST use IPSec (rumors to the contrary notwithstanding).
  
  
  • Q: Who has IPv6 assignments?
    A: See discussion on sixxs site above.


• Topic: Security issues - what are the new issues which may come up with IPv6? During the transition from IPv4 to IPv6, tunnelling or translation techniques will most likely be used because the entire network will not be changed to IPv6 overnight, What are the new risks?
  
  Discussion: No one seems to really using tunnelling (or much of anything else!) so far, so we don't really know first hand of the problems.


• Topic: Unique Local Addresses(ULA) vs Global Unicast addressing. ULAs (addresses starting with FC00::/7) are the IPv6 mechanism for site local addressing. These addresses should not be able to be routed across the Internet. What are the issues with using ULA vs Global Unicast addressing?
  
  Discusssion: There is currently no formal provision for site local (private) addresses from ARIN. There is a lot of interest in such addresses. There appeared to be some interest in providing both ULA/private addresses and globally routable addresses to a single device.


• Topic: Implementation Status: What are we doing with IPv6?
  
  Discussion: Training, labs, people are looking for information on how to set up a sandbox. Mention was made of z/OS intra-CEC use of IPv6 addressing (as a test). Labs, it was agreed, will be critical.