General

Crossing Over To IPv6?
Consider Making It A Global Crossing

Global Crossing is offering a free software tool that promises to take the drudgery out of managing and assigning Internet Protocol address space and put your ISP business on the fast track to IPv6.

by Jim Thompson [January 31, 2002]

As of Monday Global Crossing has a new lease on life. With Hutchinson Whampoa Limited and Singapore Technologies Telemedia Pte. Ltd. planing to invest $750 million in the company. The funding, combined with Global Crossing's Chapter 11 filing, should restructure its balance sheet. In the meantime, Global Crossing worldwide operations remain unaffected by the filing.

As an ISP business owner, you have an interesting proposition before you. It just depends on how important IPv6 routing is going to be to growing your ISP business this year and if you want to be part of the problem, or part of the solution, where limited addressing space is concerned.

Global Crossing has an alluring offer for ISPs interested in migrating toward full IPv6 implementation. Its free software tool promises to take the drudgery out of managing and assigning Internet Protocol address space and put you on the fast track to IPv6.

FreeIPdb, along with support services, is being offered at no charge as part of Global Crossing's efforts to help shore-up IPv4 until IPv6 is globally deployed. Working with the IP engineering community, the hope is to prolong the life of the current system until the new protocol makes more address available.

"We had a number of people ask us for FreeIPdb which we had been using in-house," said Paul Benjes, director of access planning and implementation at Global Crossing. "Some of the ISPs were using a spreadsheet or a flat file to manage their IP space. FreeIPdb makes things a lot easier."

FreeIPdb streamlines the allocation process and allows one to audit existing address space usage, which enhances the ability of Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) tables to manage router information.

Conservation, allocation, reclamation
Developed by engineers at Global Crossing, the company notes it has been "used to allocate more than two million IP addresses in parcels that range in size from two to four addresses up to thousands of addresses in the most mathematically conservative way possible."

Written in Perl, the program stores all v4 and v6 addresses as integers in the database, which uses a "best fit" algorithm. According to Global Crossing, this means that "if you do nothing but assignment/allocations(s), you will never have more than one unused block of each size in that given region at any time." The allocation and reclaim routines are also fully recursive.

"The tool uses regions just like many ISPs have regions in their network," noted Benjes. "For example, an ISP may have an East Coast region, a West Coast region or regions within their route reflectors. Since it's usually easier to allocate based on a region, the program makes it simple for engineers to manage and allocate their IP blocks."

Besides allowing ISPs to manage the distribution of IP addresses under IPv4, FreeIPdb also works with IPv6. "The smallest routable block -- that is, the IP address block that can be used independently by a customer -- in IPv6 is 322 times larger than all of IPv4 address space. It is, therefore, crucial that good tools exist to deal with the assignment and allocation of that space," said engineer Ben April, who developed the software.

Fear of failure
There is widespread fear within the Internet community that the currently available IP address space under IPv4 will be depleted by the year 2005. Whether or not this will actually happen is a source of long and spirited debate. However, it has resulted in a sense of urgency to do something to extend, or at least, manage, those addresses that are available.

One of the problems is that many ISPs don't have an efficient algorithm to assign IP address numbers to their customers. Because of this, a global effort within the IP engineering community is underway to encourage conservation and efficient distribution until IPv6 is widely available.

"IPv4 addressing is an increasingly scarce resource," said Zeus Kerravala, senior analyst at the Yankee Group. "The FreeIPdb software tool enhances the efficiency of IP addressing and IP management, putting more control back into the hands of the service provider."

Under IPv4 IP addresses are 32-bit numbers. IPv6 will expand this to 128-bit numbers. The result will be that the number of available addresses will jump from the current 4.2 billion to 340 trillion trillion trillion. That's the equivalent of 67 billion billion addresses per square centimeter of the planet.

Patches and work-arounds like FreeIPdb will help prolong the use of IPv4, but it's a widely held belief that the days are numbered for the current protocol.

"One example are the net prefixes," commented Benjes "With between 100,000 and 120,000 net prefixes being announced, we are placing a heavy load on the current BGP tables. For most service providers, all of these announcements mean purchasing new hardware to support the prefixes. IPv6 will simplify this by 'trunking-down' the prefixes and using a simplified version of BGP."

ISPs, or anyone who assigns IP addresses either internally or externally, can download FreeIPdb. In order to run FreeIPdb, you will need the following:

• A Perl interpreter (tested on 5.005_03 built for i386-freeBSD
• PosttgreSQU 7.0 with Perl interface installed (also tested on 7.1.2)
• Math: Biglnt-1.42 (this to handle the large numbers)
• Net: IP-1.0
• DBI-1.14 or better
• DBD: Pg 0.95 or better
• A Web server capable of running Perl cgi (if you want the Web front-end)

An online demo, screen shots and even support for FreeIPdb is also available from Global Crossing.

So, have you decided if your ISP business going to be part of the problem or part of the solution?

—End