NZNOG’06 is currently on at Victoria University in Wellington and we’ve been down here since late Tuesday.

Wellington must have the most dismal and disgusting weather in New Zealand. Since we arrived, I don’t think we’ve seen the sun at all, and its been raining almost continuously. Gray, dark and dismal.

The conference started yesterday with the tutorial day. Dean Pemberton and Joe Abley’s tutorial – “IPv6 Deployment – Theory and Practice” was well attended and very useful. They started off with a brief refresher on the basics of IPv6 before starting to deal with some of the issues that are preventing more widespread adoption and finishing with a great audience discussion about why we even need IPv6 at all.

The two key points that I got out of it were:

• We don’t have any real pressing driver for IPv6 deployment at the moment, other than we all want it as geeks. The only real justification that anyone could come up with for a NZ organisation to deploy IPv6 is future proofing – that is gaining experience so that once we actually find a reason to use it we already know how.
• Many people see the lack of ability to multi-home as a significant problem preventing IPv6 deployment by organisations. Its not a problem for carriers, they can multihome just as they do not, it’s a problem for organisations like universities that don’t resell connections, but have a desire for multihoming. The point that Joe made was that there is no technical reason why you can’t multihome with IPv6. The lack of ability to multihome as an end-site is based no policy, and that policy was designed and implemented by the proponents of IPv6. Once the carriers and others who are still happy on v4 start to migrate to v6 its entirely possible that we’ll see some of these policies loosened as people ignore the policy and start multihoming anyway.

The conference network has been handing out v6 addresses with native connectivity provided by TCL. Kinda nifty, but again, I’ve got an IPv6 address to play with, I can look at the dancing turtle, now what…
The rest of the program is looking interesting as well, lots of talks on peering this morning and an intruiging talk by Bill Woodcock from PCH about building global content distribution networks (basically anycast for TCP).