IPv6 and Arch Red

Arch Red is now fully IPv6 connected. Web pages, email and DNS are most visible to everyone but also less used and internal services such as routing, RADIUS and centralized authentication run on IPv6 now. The latest addition was web availability over IPv6, so we can now consider ourselves as IPv6 enabled.

Why now? Is now the time to start using IPv6? From the technical perspective IPv6 is mostly ready. Some applications and services such as VPN could still be more widely available. There is time to fix these problems, but the according to the projections, IPv4 addresses can only be distributed using the current policy for a relatively short time. For Arch Red's people IPv6 is something we have done for years. Since we consider IPv6 as one of our areas of competence, this is the right time for us.

Based on our own experiences, it is of utmost importance to make your services ready before publishing them to others. Publishing usually means adding IPv6 information to DNS or by some other means advertising your IPv6 availability. This advice about readiness is almost a cliche. As the dictionary says: overused and has thus lost its original impact. Even if this is well known, IPv6 services often do not function as well as their IPv4 counterparts.

There are many things that could be said about IPv6 but now is not the time anymore to roll out barely functional IPv6 services. There are already users out there and more and more are using IPv6 each day.