World IPv6 Day to Benefit Public, Participants Alike, Say Federal Agencies, ISPs

The Commerce Department will offer content over both IPv4 and IPv6 from its main website, a spokeswoman said. It also will offer both protocols over the sites for its agencies, NTIA, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, National Technical Information Service and the Census Bureau, she said. The Commerce Department is participating “with the aim of improving deployment efforts and identifying technical areas to improve upon throughout the agency and across the government,” she said. To prepare for the transition, NIST developed a technical standards profile and testing infrastructure “to help facilitate and accelerate wide scale adoption of IPv6 in the U.S. government,” she said. NTIA and the Internet community took part in developing an IPv6 readiness tool for businesses. It’s designed to help businesses reassess their costs, risks and other factors associated with IPv6-related issues, NTIA said.

The federal government’s implementation of the new protocol is under way. Last year, the Office of Management and Budget directed all agencies to upgrade their public-facing sites and services to support IPv6 by FY12. The Census Bureau is on track to meet that directive, it said. The Census Bureau “would like get an idea of how widely-used IPv6 is in the world,” a Census Bureau spokesperson said. “That would be based on the number of requests to census.gov from IPv6 addresses.” Internal applications and meeting the next FY14 directive from OMB are challenges with the transition, the spokesperson said. “Full vendor support for IPv6 has been slow.” Until the public sector starts using IPv6, “full vendor support will continue to develop slowly,” the bureau said. The bureau began testing the protocol four years ago, the spokesperson said. New equipment purchased by the bureau must have IPv6 capabilities, the bureau added. The General Services Administration embraces the latest technology developments, a GSA spokesman said. “IPv6 Day is a good test of our preparedness.” The Department of Veterans Affairs and the Federal Aviation Administration also are participating, but did not provide more information.

The U.S. Department of Education is expecting a “very normal day” as it tests IPv6 on its public facing website, a spokesman told us Tuesday. The agency is on track to achieve the Office of Management and Budget’s 2012 IPv6 goal, the spokesman said: “We believe it is the right direction to take for our public facing websites given that all IPv4 addresses have been allocated.” Challenges remain to IPv6 implementation, specifically with respect to the maturity of products to secure the configurations, knowledge and experience of DOE staff, training, and a general lack of IPv6 market penetration, he said.

The Treasury Department’s goal is to “push the technological envelope” and ensure a seamless transition to IPv6 “by enabling, for a short period of time, IPv6 well in advance of the deadline,” said Treasury’s Chief Information Officer Robyn East. She said the agency will be monitoring the results of the 24 hour test run and looking for feedback submitted by the public on its website.

The test run will be a “huge learning opportunity” for the Department of Energy, said Samara Moore, the agency’s senior cybersecurity policy advisor. The DOE aims to identify how much IPv6 traffic is trying to access the department’s resources now and take lessons learned to better educate and be prepared for full IPv6 implementation, Moore said. “We feel it’s important that we have a timely transition so we can continue to serve our citizens who access DOE resources through IPv6,” she said. Vendor support for the agencies is still a challenge for now but “we are seeing improvement in that area,” Moore said.

The Idaho National Laboratory (INL) is setting up a testing environment for World IPv6 Day, said Paul Martinez, manager of INL’s communications infrastructure department. INL wants to know what impact the test will have on its operations and identify what policies or hardware adjustments should be made in order to fulfill the OMB IPv6 directive by 2012, he said. “Everybody knows this will put a different spin on the hardware,” Martinez said. “We haven’t had any answers and we are trying to learn these lessons.” So far the biggest challenge to IPv6 adoption has been preparing its vendors for the shift, said Martinez, but INL is “on track” to achieve the OMB goals by 2012. INL has not established any connectivity benchmarks or goals for the IPv6 test day but will work with its peering partners to collect system statistics to analyze later.

The U.S. Departments of State, Agriculture, Transportation, Interior, and Homeland Security, are also participating in the event. The agencies would not provide more information about their expectations for IPv6 Day, despite repeated calls.

The Province of British Columbia doesn’t expect any disruptions to government services during its participation in World IPv6 Day, a spokeswoman told us Tuesday. The province is interested in finding out how many organizations will try to access government services using IPv6 and identifying what technical issues still remain, she said. The province is also interested to see what impact the test run will have to the existing IPv4 infrastructure and security, she said. It will continue to be a challenge to marshal the resources needed to implement IPv6, the spokeswoman said.