Posts Tagged: IPv6

At SIPit26 we began setting up a series of automated self-tests for IPv6, like we’ve done previously with SIP/TLS. We also integrated IPv6 in as many multiparty tests as possible, to see how IPv4 and IPv6 lived together.Some notes and experiences:

• IPv4-only applications will receive IPv6 in messaging. Even if an application DO NOT support IPv6-native connections, the application will surely get IPv6 addresses in various places in the message. In SIP, a call may traverse an IPv6 proxy before reaching your IPv4 proxy or phone. Via headers will have IPv6 and maybe a record-route header too. All user agents needs to support this. We had at least one crash in a proxy that failed to parse an IPv6 address.
• Placing an IPv4 call to a proxy that forwards the message to an IPv6 phone without handling RTP traversal leads to issues as well. The phone gets an IPv6 address in the Contact: header and failes to send the ACK properly. This happened with Asterisk. Because of parsing failure, the parser gave up and sent ACKs and BYEs to the wrong address.
• We did successfully set up calls between IPv6 user agents using IPv6 proxys. The failures happened in the mixed scenarious.
• When placing a call to a domain that was configured with both A and AAAA records for the SRV records, but only one of them responding, we noticed long timeouts before failover, if that even happened. Many discussions about this followed, which lead to the conclusion that this was a poorly configured domain. Some implementations have hard-coded a preference for IPv4 since IPv6 is mostly used over tunnels and add latency today. This should be user-configurable. An owner of a domain can use SRV record weights to indicate a preference to one or the other protocols, which is a better solution. If you use IPv6 over tunnels, make sure that you separate host records for A and AAAA and have a preference towards the A record hosts in your SRV records.

We do need to continue testing all kinds of migration scenarious to  be able to come up with a best current practise document. SIPit26 gave us many good experiences to build from. I hope that testing continues at SIPit27 with the new SIPit IPv6-o-matic(R)(C)(TM) and the prompts from Allison Smith!

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• Edvina

With the recent partnership between the SIP Forum and the IPv6 Forum, the IPv6 Forum joins the SIPit 26 team as an association partner.  The IPv6 Forum has been working with spreading the word about the need for migration to IPv6 for many years and have a mission to “advocate IPv6 by dramatically improving technology, market, and deployment user and industry awareness of IPv6, creating a quality and secure new Generation Internet and allowing world-wide equitable access to knowledge and technology, embracing a moral responsibility to the world.”

-” It’s high time to move to end 2 end.” says Latif Ladid, IPv6 Forum, “IPv6 and SIP are natively designed for
it. The best way around something is to go through it”.

SIPit is a test event organized by the SIP Forum for the realtime communication developers using the IETF Session Initiation Protocol for IP telephony, presence, instant messaging and other applications. SIPit has been organized 25 times around the world, with the upcoming event – number 26 – being organized in Stockholm, Sweden.

-”SIP is currently used on many devices, and it will be used on many new types of things that communicate over IP. All these devices will need addresses that are globally reachable for realtime communication – video, audio, chat and other types of personal communication over an enterprise IP network or the Internet.” says Olle E. Johansson at Edvina, the company that hosts SIPit 26 together with TANDBERG. “There simply won’t be any public IPv4 addresses for all these intelligent things, so it’s important for the SIP industry to embrace, understand and implement the IPv6 protocol everywhere. Using IPv6 will also save time and money that is today used to implement complicated NAT traversal solutions. For a global realtime communication platform, we need a global IP network – and that’s going to be based on IPv6.”

SIPit26 takes place in Kista, north of Stockholm, Sweden May 17-21, 2010. SIPit global web site is at http://www.sipit.net, the event site for SIPit 26 is at http://sipit.edvina.se

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The IPv6 Forum is a world-wide consortium of worldwide leading Internet vendors, Industry Subject Matter Experts, Research & Education Networks, with a clear mission to advocate IPv6 by dramatically improving technology, market, and deployment user and industry awareness of IPv6, creating a quality and secure new Generation Internet and allowing world-wide equitable access to knowledge and technology, embracing a moral responsibility to the world.
To this end the IPv6 FORUM has

• established an open, international FORUM of IPv6 expertise
• shared IPv6 knowledge and experience among members
• promoted new IPv6-based applications and global solutions
• promoted interoperable implementations of Ipv6 standards
• co-operated to achieve end-to-end quality of service
• resolved issues that create barriers to IPv6 deployment

The Internet Engineering Task Force has sole authority for IPv6 protocol standards. The IPv6 Forum reserves the right to develop IPv6 Deployment Guides to foster the operational use of IPv6.

The IPv6 Forum is a non-profit organisation registered in Luxembourg since July 17, 1999. The admin secretariat is run by the audit company Horsburgh based in Luxembourg.

We would like to take this opportunity to urge your organization to sign up to become Members of the IPv6 Forum. Forum membership application information as well as the Benefits of Membership can be found under Membership Benefits section. If we band together to stimulate the deployment and sales of IPv6 solutions, then everyone can benefit. As of September 1999, just before the IPv6 World Summit in Paris, the IPv6 FORUM had 60 Members. As of November 2004, the membership has grown over 175.

In case you are not directly involved in such promotion issues, we would be grateful to receive contact names for people in your organisation who can make the membership decision to bring you on board.

The IPv6 Forum welcomes every helping hand, and we invite you to join us. Your valuable addition to our membership would be another important step towards the success of this noble mission.

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The SIP Forum and the IPv6 Forum just announced a partnership to promote interoperability. This is very welcome. While I believe there are many SIP applications that work over a pure IPv6 network, I don’t think all applications handle migration properly. There’s still a lot of experience to build up and guidelines to write.

For SIPit 26, I was hoping we could create automated self tests for a lot of IPv6 tests, like:

• Connecting to a domain URI from IPv4, getting IPv6 host records
• Connecting to a domain, getting multiple SRV records with mixed IPv6 and IPv4
• Setting up a call, getting IPv6 in the SDP over IPv4
• Setting up a call to a domain, finding out that DNS for that domain only has IPv6 glue records
• ICE with dual stacks on one end – which transport will be used
• ICE with dual stacks on both ends – is there transport selection preference?
• Setting up a call from IPv4 only phone, getting only IPv6 addresses – selection of default ALG for IPv6

There are a number of test scenarious that needs to be set up. At SIPit, we have enough developers gathered to do this and at SIPit26 we have the support of .se that has IPv6 as one of the focus areas. Let’s test IPv6 at SIPit!

Read the Press Release from the SIP Forum and the IPv6 Forum!

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