Posted by Nathan Kaiser on Sat Jan 10 12:27:00 UTC 2009
Can you see the spinning logo on our website? Look reeeeally hard.
Oh, and don’t forget to load the site using your IPv6-connected computer.
Some background: A couple months ago, our ARIN-assigned IPv4 space (Yes, we’re the only rails hosting provider with directly assigned ARIN ip space.) was starting to get full, so we applied for (and were granted) additional IPv4 space for customer deploys and expansions. This brought us to the point where we had enough IPv4 space allocated to us that ARIN would essentially “give” us an IPv6 allocation if we could justify it, without paying additional yearly fees. IPv6 allocations are incredibly easy to justify, and we’d been itching to give it a try anyway, so we applied and were granted our own IPv6 space.
Long story short: In the past couple of weeks we’ve been experimenting with our IPv6 allocation and have managed to get our website and a few other resources working in native IPv6 mode. It was actually a lot easier to do than we expected. In a week or two we should be to the point where we can start giving our customers the option of having their websites and other services available on the IPv6 internet (as well as the IPv4 internet) as an experimental value-add service.
Hmmm… maybe I need to give a little more background: Each and every computer or other electronic device connected to the internet must have a number assigned to it known as an Internet Protocol (IP) address in order to communicate with the other computers and electronic devices also connected to the internet. (With a few caveats) these IP addresses must be unique. Today the most widely-used form of the IP address on the internet is IP version 4 (a protocol that’s over 20 years old) in which each computer gets assigned a unique 4-byte value that is its IP address. IPv4 addresses are written as a series of 4 numbers. For example, the IP address for www.blueboxgrp.com is 208.85.151.61. There are a total of 4294967296 possible IPv4 addresses available for use across the entire planet. (And of this, the number of actually usable IPv4 addresses is considerably smaller due to a number of technical factors.)
Well, the smart people who make the internet work are pretty good with numbers, and several years ago they saw the rapid growth of the internet and started to do some math. The conclusion they came to is that sometime in the next few years we’re going to run out of IPv4 addresses. That is, everything that can be assigned will be assigned– and it’ll just be tough luck for anyone who doesn’t already have a block of IPv4 addresses to work with. You won’t be able to launch your awesome new web app, hook up your new computer, or even connect your new iPhone to the internet. Of course, it’s expected that the closer we get to that fateful day the more and more desperate companies depending on internet-driven technologies are going to get. (Are there even any companies around anymore who don’t rely on e-mail or the web or telephones to get their work done?) We already have to justify every single IPv4 address we give out, and in the future it’s not only going to get harder to justify the addresses; It’s going to get a lot more expensive too.
So… these same smart people started working on a solution to the problem. And although there’s been a lot of argument, varying standards, and disagreement on some of the nitty-gritty details, the solution they came up with is IPv6. This is the “next generation” IP addressing protocol which is already starting to get widely deployed in Europe and Asia. Among other technical improvements, in this addressing scheme, 128 bits are used for the unique numbers which identify each computer. This equates to 16 bytes of data, or about 340282366920938463463374607431768211456 possible addresses, give or take a few. (To give you an idea how much addressing space this is… if you were to evenly distribute this address space across the surface of the earth, this would mean that every square meter on the surface of the planet could use 667220327295957771496812 IP addresses. If it wanted to. And if it had that many iPhones.) In other words: Problem solved. At least until Humans become an inter-galactic species.
So what does this mean for Blue Box Group, and our customers? Actually– not a whole lot right now. That is to say, so far that date when we run out of the IPv4 addresses is far enough out there that nobody is panicking yet. In fact, especially in the United States, adoption of IPv6 is still very minimal– there just hasn’t been enough financial justification for most companies to go through the transition to IPv6 yet. (Those smart people who predict these things are saying that we’ll start to see a lot of companies switching over as soon as the home Internet Service Providers start giving out IPv6 addresses to their customers.) Most of the gear on the internet is ready to start running the new protocol (including all your customers’ operating systems), it’s just that nobody has set it up yet because there isn’t enough money in it. Yet.
So why is Blue Box Group deploying IPv6? We want to be ready. We want to be at a point where we’ve already gone through the headaches, the problems, and worked out all the weirdness in the system so that we can help our customers make the changes they’ll need to when it becomes prudent to do so, and not have to go through the growing pains. We know this transition is going to happen. And we’re going to be there with the knowledge and experience to get you through it.
That, and it’s really cool. We are totally geeks, you know.
So what if you want to have an IPv6 enabled website? Give us a call! We’d be happy to turn up the next-generation internet for you. For the first month or so, please understand that this is going to be an experimental service, and so our usual SLAs won’t apply to the IPv6 service specifically. Also realize that there’s a lot of software in use today which is not “IPv6 ready.” (Although we can usually come up with work-arounds and solutions for these technical problems.) And be aware that there may be things we can’t anticipate (like if, for example, your website code is written only to handle IPv4 addresses– you’ll need to do an update, eh.) There are also a few other technical hurdles you may have to get over, and some new terminology and new concepts to learn (For example, IPv6 addresses look different: The IPv6 address for www.blueboxgrp.com is 2607:f700::61 ), but we’ll help you– we already have more experience with IPv6 than most other hosting companies and we are the only ruby on rails hosting company supporting IPv6.
So that’s it– you can mark us up on the “geek” scale a little bit for being early adopters of the next-generation internet.
Oh yeah– and that animated icon on our IPv6 site? It’s an IPv6 thing.
– Stephen Balukoff
CTO
Blue Box Group
