What is IPV6?
IPv6 was developed by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) to deal with the long-anticipated IPv4 address exhaustion. IPv6 is intended to replace IPv4. This new version of the protocol serves the same functions as IPv4 except, it does this without the same limitations as of IPv4.
IPv6 Address vs IPv4 Address
IPv6 | IPv4 | |
Address length | 128 bit | 32 bit |
No. of IP Address | 2128 | 232 |
Address representation | 8 groups of 4 hexadecimal digits | Four numbers whose value range from 0 to 255 |
Separator | : | . |
Loopback IP | ::1 | 127.0.0.1 |
Broadcast and Multicast addresses | No broadcast addresses, only multicast address |
Both broadcast and multicast address available |
Example | 2405:E200:0000:0000:0000:0000:0000:0001 | 10.10.10.1 |
Why now?
There was a big push from Government of India, Ministry of Communications & IT and DoT (Department of Telecommunications, India) to move or make services/applications compatible on IPv4 + IPv6 (Dual Stack).
They said that the ‘Digital India’ program aims to connect all Gram Panchayat by broadband Internet, promote e-governance and transform India into a connected knowledge economy. IPv6 transition is essential to ensure open, scalable and sustainable growth of Internet which is a key element of digital infrastructure. Moreover expanding the pool of IP addresses yields other benefits as well. Because of the dearth of IPv4 addresses, much of the Internet relies on NAT (Network Address Translation). With IPv6, every device can literally have its own unique public IP address. All devices will be accessible on the public network, making it easier for people to manage things like home automation, file sharing, online gaming, peer-to-peer programs and other applications without complex settings on their router. There are also features of the IPv6 protocol itself that make it more secure than IPv4. The integrity and authenticity of each IPv6 packet is ensured through encryption and techniques aimed at preventing packet spoofing. IPv6 is much better than IPv4 at making sure Internet traffic gets to the correct destination without being intercepted
In order to support the ‘Digital India’ program and do our bit in India’s development, we Info Edge (India) Ltd, started accepting IPv6 traffic along with IPv4 on dual stack for all our portals (www.naukri.com, www.firstnaukri.com, www.naukrigulf.com, www.99acres.com, www.jeevansathi.com, www.shiksha.com, www.allcheckdeals.com, etc.) from Sept 2015 onwards. We made our nameservers compatible to IPv6 by getting the GLUE Records updated with IPv6 and follow the same for subsequent new DNS requests.
Implementation
- Since the IPv6 address is huge as compared to IPv4 address, all the database columns were altered which were logging IPs. In case the column length is low, one would get errors in application/web logs.
- Required code changes were made to handle a larger IP address.
- Same time we had modified our apache stack to log and identify all IPv6 address. That request might be coming from CDN header or an HTTP/s header.
- Similarly we ensured that our custom Mod Security identify (GEOIP_COUNTRY_CODE & GEOIP_COUNTRY_NAME) and make allow/blocking decisions as per matching rule set for IPv6.
We encourage the application team to ensure application assessment & readiness functions too. Few examples are:
Core socket functions
- Protocol address in function argument
- Address data structures
- New IPv6 address data structure
- Name-to-address translation
- New functions to support IPv6 and IPv4
- Address-to-name conversion functions
- New functions to support IPv6 and IPv4
Functions
- Functions gethostbyname and gethostbyaddr are IPv4 specific.
- New functions getipnodebyname and getipnodebyaddr now support IPv4 and IPv6
- New functions getnameinfo and getaddrinfo are protocol independent
- struct sockaddr_in has to be replaced with struct sockaddr_in6
e.g., current dual stack status for www.naukri.com:
In case further information, please reach out to jai.sharma@naukri.com
I would say it wasn’t necessary and there had been no added value to existing users. India, UAE doesn’t have a consumer base of IPv6 network available and most of the user base for naukri.com is regional, there are no technical advantages as well.
Having said that, congratulations on being IPv6 compliant. I would love to see the website traffic coming from IPv6 network for naukri.com.
Cheers,
Utsav
It’s all about early adoption… Some basic statistics on IPv6 adoption
– IPv6 over all US deployement is 36%, France 59%, Germany 49%, Finland 36% & IPv6 Website – 45.52%, China – 7.41%, Brazil – 52.94% as per Cisco http://6lab.cisco.com/stats/ (continouesly increasing …)
– Some more stats Per-Country IPv6 adoption as per google – http://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html
We see almost 25 – 30% of international users.across portals on both IPv4 & IPv6.
Jai,
Thanks for sharing the details.
I see the IPv6 deployment is at ~10% and which is confirmed via Google Stats.
https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html
The IPv6 roll out triggers the question of Important vs Required.
– Utsav