Home / server / Questions / 142697
Accepted
Josh
Asked: 2010-05-18 09:42:45 +0800 CST

What should a hosting company do to prepare for IPv6?

  • 772

At the time of writing The IPv4 Depletion Site estimates there are 300 days remaining before all IPv4 addresses have been allocated. I've been following the depletion of IPv4 addresses for some time and realize the "crisis" has been going on for many years and IPv4 addresses have lasted longer than expected, however...

As the systems administrator for a small SaaS / website hosting company, what steps should I be taking to prepare for IPv6? We run a handful of CentOS and Ubuntu Linux systems on managed hardware in a remote datacenter. All our servers have IPv6 addresses but they appear to be link local addresses.

Our primary business function is website hosting on a proprietary website CMS system. One of my concerns is SSL certificates; at the moment every customer with an SSL certificate gets a dedicated IPv4 IP address. What else should I be concerned about / what action should I take to be prepared for IPv4 depletion?

linux ipv6

2 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    See this PDF on what to think about when preparing for IPv6, also look at the reference section in the end.

    I would also reccomend Deploying IPv6 Networks

    See also John Curran's presentation

    To summarize: 1. get an IPv6 address space

    1. verify ipv6 connectivity (native or tunneled) this includes things like DNS, ssl certs

    2. Operating systems, software, and network management tool upgrades may be required for IPv6 functionality

    3. Router, firewall, and other hardware upgrades (anti-spam appliances etc)

    4. IT staff and customer service training- there's no point in preparing for IPv6 if you haven't taken some time to learn how it works

    • 8

  2. I suggest that hosting company needs to upgrade their Server Load Balancer (SLB) equipment to IPv6 support. It will ease IPv6 deployment (SLB will give you virtual IPv6 address and either v6-v4 (dual stack) reals server, v6-only reals server, and v4-only reals server).

    I have evaluated one of the SLB from Brocade (ADX1000) that give you IPv6 SLB, and you can easily make your existing IPv4-only server to give IPv6 services via SLB without (almost) any configuration on your existing server.

    • 3