Deploy360 25 April 2012

Want To Make Your Web Content Available over IPv6? Check Out The Excellent RFC 6589

By Dan YorkSenior Advisor

IETF Logo Are you a “content provider,” such as a website operator, seeking to understand how to ensure your content is available over IPv6? Would you like to know what challenges you can expect? What kind of migration strategies you can use?  What you should do for an implementation plan?

If so, the IETF recently published an excellent guide in RFC 6589, “Considerations for Transitioning Content to IPv6 available at:

http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6589

The primary author is Jason Livingood of Comcast but many others have contributed to creating an excellent document! It explains both the issues with moving content to IPv6 and offers suggestions for migration plans and implementation tactics. With World IPv6 Launch fast approaching on June 6, 2012, it is excellent to have this document available to help content providers understand what they need to do!

From the introduction to the RFC:

This document describes considerations for the transition of end-user content on the Internet to IPv6. While this is tailored to address end-user content, which is typically web-based, many aspects of this document may be more broadly applicable to the transition to IPv6 of other applications and services. The issues explored herein will be of particular interest to major web content sites (sometimes described hereinafter as “high-service-level domains”), which have specific and unique concerns related to maintaining a high-quality user experience for all of their users during their transition to IPv6. This document explores the challenges involved in the transition to IPv6, potential migration tactics, possible migration phases, and other considerations. Some sections of this document also include information about the potential implications of various migration tactics or phased approaches to the transition to IPv6.

You can see from the table of contents the range of topics covered in the document:

1. Introduction
2. Challenges When Transitioning Content to IPv6
3. IPv6 Adoption Implications
4. Potential Migration Tactics
5. Potential Implementation Phases
6. Other Considerations
6.1. Security Considerations
6.2. Privacy Considerations
6.3. Considerations with Poor IPv4 and Good IPv6 Transport

The document is an excellent guide for content providers and anyone seeking to understand how to make their content available over IPv6. We’ve now added RFC 6589 to our list of resources and look forward to learning how it may help many of you get your content ready for IPv6!

Disclaimer: Viewpoints expressed in this post are those of the author and may or may not reflect official Internet Society positions.

Related Posts

Improving Technical Security 15 March 2019

DNS Privacy Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

We previously posted about how the DNS does not inherently employ any mechanisms to provide confidentiality for DNS transactions,...

Improving Technical Security 14 March 2019

Introduction to DNS Privacy

Almost every time we use an Internet application, it starts with a DNS (Domain Name System) transaction to map...

Improving Technical Security 13 March 2019

IPv6 Security for IPv4 Engineers

It is often argued that IPv4 practices should be forgotten when deploying IPv6, as after all IPv6 is a...