The “IPv6 investigation” project has made good progress since my previous post in January.  We have had global connectivity since February, and have been testing on a variety of subnets since then, including all of our “server” subnets, and most recently the “Appleton Tower” (including Forrest Hill and Wilkie) managed DICE desktop subnet.

We have seen few issues with these, so will be rolling IPv6 out to the Forum DICE subnet on Tuesday of next week (6th September).  All SL7 machines on that subnet will then acquire IPv6 addresses, which they will start to use, often in preference to their IPv4 addresses.  DNS entries will also be created for all of these machines.

(Servers are being given IPv6 addresses individually as their managers deem the services on them to be IPv6-ready, particularly as regards access control.)

Unfortunately we won’t be able to roll out IPv6 to self-managed machines for a while yet.  Many of our network switches are currently lacking some security features which are required before it would be safe to open these subnets to the variety of systems we have on them.  We had hoped that these switches would have been upgraded by now, but the process was blocked by IS’s ongoing EdLAN review.  We’ll post again once we’re in a position to begin IPv6 tests with self-managed machines.

Managed Windows desktops will also be IPv4-only for now.  We identified a few issues with these in testing, which we have passed back to IS for evaluation, and await their response.

The project’s working documentation, including useful links, can be found here.

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