At this week’s Interop conference in New York, attendees will be able to see a wide range of technologies from many different vendors. But some of the most interesting technology at the show will be running inside of the show’s InteropNet network.
That’s because, as was the case at the spring Interop show in Las Vegas, IPv6 will be a big part of InteropNet, serving as both a demonstration of the technology that will run the Internet in the near future and, at the same time, providing a good set of lessons learned for businesses deploying IPv6.
One of the big take-away’s from the Las Vegas IPv6 InteropNet was how well everything worked, despite the wide variety of hardware and software used to create the network. According to Brandon Ross of the TorreyPoint Group IT consultancy and one of the team that deploys and manages the InteropNet, "The real theme of what's been going on with v6 InteropNet is that, to most everyone's surprise, v6 has worked very, very well. We've had a minimal number of problems."
Ross said that most of the problems they have encountered could be classified as minutia, but that they’ve had to deal with a lot of minutia. One of his main pieces of advice for building a IPv6 network is to pay close attention to the details.
Human error turned out to be one of the bigger problems that they ran into with the Las Vegas IPv6 network. While network managers have become used to writing down or even verbally passing on IPv4 addresses, the longer and more complex hexadecimal addresses of IPv6 can quickly lead to errors.
Ross said, "One of the things that we've learned is that, when dealing with v6, you don't want to try to write an address down on a piece of paper or to read it off to someone. What you really want to do is find some way to cut and paste or communicate that address in some form of digital fashion so that you're not making mistakes."
