Networking in Windows is deceptively easy. The level of development Microsoft has achieved to make it so is quite considerable, and I contrast it here with the amount of tweaking required to get Unix services off the ground.
That said, a well-implemented IP structure is the cornerstone of any enterprise (or even serious home) office deployment. I’ve composed a series of five articles on topics you should be really getting right! There are certainly more, but these stick out in my mind.
3. IPv6 is coming
If you haven’t already started looking at IPv6, you should. Even though there are billions of valid IPv4 addresses, a lot are wasted by the way they’re carved up so there won’t be enough to go around. The predictions of doom get revised by the week, but at the very least the protocols themselves are long overdue for a makeover, and you should get ready sooner than later/
IPv6 includes some considerable improvements, the most obvious and famous is the gargantuan address size, so big we have to dump it down to images like addressing every grain of sand of every beach on the planet.
The big benefit here is that address spaces virtually as large as the entire IPv4 space can be assigned to single countries, and over-provisioning of the space is a key factor in deciding how to carve it up. Internet routers have a lot of work deciding which of the myriad paths is right for traffic, and by dividing the space into these huge units, the routing tables can become much, much smaller, allowing the Internet to continue it’s amazing rate of expansion.
But the address space is only one of the improvements. Considerable work has been done to ensure IPv6 networks just work. One of these innovations is the creation of link-local addresses, a form of DHCP, and Router Solicitation. The task of configuring your devices has been moved from your centralised or distributed DHCP server to the devices that know your network the best: your routers.
IPv4 evolved from the first networks mostly when 256kbps was FAST! The protocols have been extended and augmented with things like Quality of Service, IPSec and all kinds of other solutions for secure (and plain) tunnelling. This has resulted in a confusing array of features and incompatibilities.
IPv6 includes a lot of these as standard (IPSec is now mandatory), and improves on others. QoS is vitally important for letting your routers know that your VoIP conversation is much more important than downloading your iTunes purchase, and IPv6 handles these decisions much more intelligently and consistently. Each part of the data packet (IP header, IP payload, TCP/UDP payload, and frequently the application itself) is also checksummed to detect errors, and each layer adds its own checksum, so IPv6 assumes these problems will be detected higher up in the protocol stack and does away with its own layer, further increasing speed.
You should even be able to request addresses for your entire organisation that are all internet-valid, doing away with RPIPA-type addressing (as I mentioned in my previous post here). How organisations deal with the change is still to be seen, but I sincerely hope NAT dies the death it deserves. More on this in my later article, NAT is not a Firewall.
Not all ISPs route or offer the protocol yet, nor do most Internet services, so don’t expect your Internet connection to be switched over any time soon. Versions of Windows from Vista and Server 2003 onwards (XP/2000 has limited support) now including IPv6 out-the-box running gladly alongside the IPv4 stack, you’re free to experiment and explore.
These are challenges you’ll be facing before long, so getting to grips now is well worth the effort.
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