Monday, January 26, 2015

The sad tale of the ISP that didn’t deploy IPv6

Once upon a time in the not so distant past, a large ISP dominated a country’s telecommunications market and felt powerful and without competition. Whenever someone needed to log on to the Internet they would use their services. Everyone envied their market penetration.

This large ISP, however, had never wanted to deploy IPv6 because they thought their stock of IP addresses was enough and saw no indicator telling them that they needed the new protocol.

During the course of those years, another smaller ISP began implementing IPv6 and slowly began to grow, as they realized that the protocol did indeed make a difference in the eyes of their clients and that it was helping them win over new users.

The small ISP’s market penetration continued to grow, as did their earnings and general respect for their services. As they grew, it became easier for them to obtain better equipment, traffic and interconnection prices. Everything was going very well. The small ISP couldn’t believe that something as simple as deploying IPv6 could be paying off so spectacularly. Their customers told them their needs included running VPNs and holding conference calls with partners in other parts of the world, and that their subsidiaries, customers and business partners in Europe and Asia had already adopted IPv6.

Despite being so powerful, the large ISP began experiencing internal problems that were neither billing nor money related. Sales staff complained that they were having trouble closing many deals because customers had started asking for IPv6 and, although their ISP was so large and important, they simply did not have IPv6 to offer. Both corporate customers and residential users were asking for IPv6; even major state tenders were requiring IPv6.

When this started happening, the Sales Manager complained to the Products, Engineering and Operations departments. The latter were left speechless and some employees were let go by the company. In the end, Sales did not care where the fault lay – they were simply unable to gain new customers. Realizing that they were losing customers, some of the salespeople accepted job offers at the small ISP who was looking to grow their staff as they could now afford the best sales force. Then the same thing happened with the larger ISP’s network manager, an expert who knew a lot about IPv6 but who had been unable to overcome the company’s bureaucracy and bring the new protocol into production. Logically, the network manager was followed by his trusted server administrator and head of security. The large ISP couldn’t believe what was happening right before their very eyes. The sales force hired by the smaller ISP (those who used to work for the large ISP) brought with them their huge customer base, all of them potential prospects.

A stampede of the large ISP’s clients was on the way. The months went by and the smaller ISP was no longer simply offering Internet access – its Data Center had grown, major companies brought in new cache servers and much more. They were now offering co-location, hosting, virtual hosting, voice and video, among many other services.

When the large provider decided to deploy IPv6, it had to do so very quickly. Things went wrong; many errors were made. In addition, certain consultants and companies took advantage of their problems and charged higher rush fees. Network downtime increased, as did the number of calls to the call center. The large ISP’s reputation started to crumble.

As expected, in the end, everyone who was part of this story – clients and providers alike – ended up deploying IPv6. Some ended up happier than others, but everyone adopted IPv6 on their networks.

Monday, December 8, 2014

Python Script: Probably useless but functional IPv6 Network scanner

Below is the code of what is probably useless but a functional IPv6 host scanner written in Python using threading.

To perform a regular (brute force) network scans in an IPv6 Network is almost impossible it can take over 5.000 years to finish.

This project was purely academic and I just wanted to learn about threading in Python.

This software is not recommended for general usage.....

This  script  will call the OS to actually perform the ping

This software receives two parameters:
a) Prefix to scan in the format 2001:db8::/64 (subnet, not host)
b) Number of simultaneous processes it can run (MAXPINGS)

One more time it was purely academic stuff but hopefully it can make your day

Finally, AFAIK nmap does not yet support IPv6 network scan.

The code written in python3:

--- cut here ---

#!/usr/bin/python3

import threading
import sys
import ipaddress
import subprocess
import time

CURRENTPINGS=0 # Number of simultaneous ping at a time

def DOPING6(IPv6ADDRESS):
  global MAXPINGS, CURRENTPINGS
  CURRENTPINGS+=1
  CMD="ping6 -c 3 "+str(IPv6ADDRESS) + " 2> /dev/null > /dev/null"
  return_code = subprocess.call(CMD, shell=True)
  if return_code == 0:  #If ping was succesful
    print (IPv6ADDRESS," is alive")
 
  CURRENTPINGS-=1
 
def main():
  global MAXPINGS, CURRENTPINGS
  if len(sys.argv) != 3: #Validate how many parameters we are receiving
    print("  Not enough or too many parameter")
    print("  Usage: ./scanipv6.py IPv6Prefix/lenght MAXPINGS")
    print("  Example: ./scanipv6.py 2001:db8::/64 20")
    print("  Prefix lenght can be between 64-128")
    print("  MAXPINGS corresponds to how many pings will be running at the same time")
    exit()

  SUBNET,MASK=sys.argv[1].split("/")
  MAXPINGS=int(sys.argv[2])

  for addr in ipaddress.IPv6Network(sys.argv[1]):  #Let's loop for each address in the Block
    ping_thread=threading.Thread(target=DOPING6,args=(addr,))

    while CURRENTPINGS >= MAXPINGS: # With this while we make it possible to run max simultaneous pings
      time.sleep(1)  # Let's wait one second before proceeding
      #print ("Interrumping...., CURRENTPINGS > MAXPINGS") #Uncomment this line just for debugging

    ping_thread.start()

main()

Monday, November 17, 2014

$GENERATE A records using BIND. Match forward and rDNS

Hi,
This post is very short but perhaps very useful. There is less documentation on the Internet than expected.

Objective: 
a) Set the reverse DNS and forward DNS match for a / 24 in BIND9 using $GENERATE.

Requirements: 
- A  /24 network (of course, you can adapt the example to other networks)
- BIND9
- We will use A and PTR records

Example: 
Network: 192.168.30.0/24
Domain: example.com

Let's make the rDNS for 192.168.30.X resolved to: X.client.example.com
Similarly, X.client.example.com to resolve to 192.168.30.X

It would be like this:
192.168.30.1 ---> 1.client.example.com
192.168.30.2 ---> 2.client.example.com
192.168.30.3 ---> 3.client.example.com
1.client.example.com ---> 192.168.30.1
2.client.example.com ---> 192.168.30.2
3.client.example.com ---> 192.168.30.3
(Etc)

Steps: 
We create reverse zone in /etc/bind/named.conf.

a) The reverse zone:

zone "30.168.192.in-addr.arpa" {
type master;
file "30.168.192.in-addr.arpa.db";
allow-query {any; };
};


After that, then in file 30.168.192.in-addr.arpa.db place the following: 

$TTL    86400 ; 24 hours, could have been written as 24h or 1d
@  1D  IN        SOA localhost.     hostmaster.example.com. (
                              2002022401 ; serial
                              3H ; refresh
                              15 ; retry
                              1w ; expire
                              3h ; minimum
                             )
; Name servers for the zone - both out-of-zone - no A RRs required
                        NS      localhost.

$GENERATE 1-255 $ PTR $.client.example.com.


b) The forward DNS is doing the following in the client.example.com zone file: 

$TTL    86400 ; 24 hours, could have been written as 24h or 1d
@  1D  IN        SOA localhost.     hostmaster.example.com. (
                              2002022401 ; serial
                              3H ; refresh
                              15 ; retry
                              1w ; expire
                              3h ; minimum
                             )
; Name servers for the zone - both out-of-zone - no A RRs required
                        NS      localhost.

$GENERATE 1-255.client.example.com $ A 192.168.30.$



Testing: 
#dig -x 192.168.30.3 (reverse dns) 
#dig 3.cliente.ejemplo.com (forward dns) 



P.S. As usual there can be more than way of doing this kind of things.

Saturday, October 18, 2014

Is there any relationship regarding the deployment of IPv6 between entities with ASNs of 16 and 32 bits?

Hi,
  Today this came to my mind and fortunately I knew the data existed and to locate the answer was more or less simple. I've been reviewing some data from APNIC (* 1) for several weeks (always focused on the area of ​​coverage Lacnic).
  APNIC stores a percentage value per ASN called called ipv6capable, basically is a number that indicates what percentage of an ASN has capacity for IPv6. They have another variable called ipv6 preferred but we will not talk about it right now.
  Going back to my micro study: I took a sample for three days: 11, 12 and October 15, 2014

My results (for ipv6capable) were:

Day October 15 (Wednesday)
1.34% in ASNs of 16 bits
1.12% in ASNs of 32 bits
1.26% in all ASNs
----
Day October 11 (Saturday)
1.34% in 16-bit ASN
1.15% in 32-bit ASN
1.27% all ASN
---
Day October 12 (Sunday)
1.35% in 16-bit
1.12% in 32-bit
1.27% all ASN (ASN 3313)
----

I evaluated about 2050  ASNs of 16-bits  and 1200 ASN of 32 bits. The difference between ipv6capable ASNs 16 and 32 bits is about 0.2, it is certainly a very small number but when it comes to traffic and users on the Internet these numbers represent significant volume.

My humble finding for this study is simple: It seems that there is a *very* slight preference for the deployment of IPv6 in 16-bit ASN.

Regards,

(*1) http://labs.apnic.net/ipv6-measurement/AS/

Monday, August 5, 2013

IPv6 & Satellite links: The right solution for rest of the world


Abstract:
 Nowadays, having Internet access is a right. It’s like having electricity or water. Being an extremist, I would even say it’s like oxygen in somehow.
  This small draft tries to summarize a simple combination of technologies that is supposed to be a long term solution to remote places where Internet access if generally difficult to get.
 One of the goals of mankind today should be to offer good and reliable Internet access to everyone, in despite of their location. Our current motivation is oriented to places where a terrestrial link is impossible to find.
 We basically want to mix two good technologies that unfortunately we believe are not working together today: 1) satellite links and 2) IPv6. The first one with its pros and cons -as all kind of technology- is a proven solution. The second one has also proved to be reliable, and is the de facto standard for the near future.

Introduction:
  In the last 13 years of my life I have been working in the satellite link area. Additionally, since 1998 I've been curious about IPv6 but it was not until six years ago that I've really been able to work with it. Finally, I have always been passionate about Internet, communications and freedom of information

As a technical person I have always preferred connections over fiber,  copper or even wireless links (microwave, Wi-Fi, WIMAX, etc.) however these are not always possible, mostly because of site location.

One of the goals of mankind today should be to offer good and reliable Internet access to everyone, in ispite of their location .

Proposal:
 One of the amazing things of satellite links, it’s their capability to reach virtually anywhere in the globe. I’ve had the chance to participate in satellite port installations in very remote places such as boats at sea or in remote rural or jungle sites where there isn't even cell phone signal. In turn I have seen all kinds of solutions deployed on these links: ATM (Automatic Teller Machines), PoS (Point of Sales), corporate private link and of course: Internet Access.

 During the last years I have been deeply involved with IPv6. I am a firm believer in the “Internet of things” concept, where most things need and will be connected to Internet .

  Unfortunately, for various reasons, the conventional thinking is that  Internet connections are suitable only for  home and office applications in urban sites. Even though  this is partly true, we cannot forget the great masses of people (and things) in non-urban areas, remarkably greater in developing countries. In the end, this fact becomes very negative. Millions of people are being left behind when the advantages of Internet access is taken away from them. i.e.: access to e-learning, e-nursering, telemedicine, research, cloud computing, online consultations and many other great benefits provided.

 Though fiber links, hybrid fiber-coax and very high-speed Wireless links are growing in all countries, there are places where these technologies will never be seen or will be missing for several decades. The solution I see coming, one we should not miss, is the pairing of the new Internet protocol (IPv6) and satellite communications. Of course Satellite links exist everywhere and IPv6 is coming forward, what propose is to keep those technologies together.

It is my point of view that this combination is the only one that really combines a long-term feasibility. And is currently achievable! This is the right way to connect everyone in the globe and also support the emerging new protocol and many Internet-based services that already exist and undoubtedly will be growing up at least during the next few years.

Unfortunately satellite technology providers have been among the last to offer IPv6 based solutions. At present, if you google something like: “IPv6  satellite hubs” you won’t get an easy link to click on, and then, if you hit on the results, you won't find  major Satellite vendors that specifically support IPv6 Hubs. As far as I know, last year there was only one Satellite Hub manufacturer that added IPv6 support to its solution. Saying that, we have seen a change, though small, by one  supplier.  There looks to be already products (very few) on the market with native -IPv6- implementations. My belief is that with some support from the community, and probably from some organization and collaboration we can do this combination a “must to have” among satellite hubs suppliers. We think that if the satellite industry  keeps growing without IPv6, it will be worse for it in the long term. Our assumption is based upon what IPv6 has to offer and what  the lack of it might do to remote locations: 1) missing IPv6 in satellite technology in those locations will hurt IPv6 deployment, 2) Those places won’t enjoy some benefits offered by IPv6.

 Finally, I would like to mention that traditional problems found in satellite links such as: 1) round trip delay and 2) costs; are being solved with new technologies. Also there are some new initiatives that will boost even more this situation.

Conclusion:
 The combination of satellite links and IPv6 is the right way to provide Internet access in very remote places in order to prepare for the current and the future of Internet-based services.