[nycbug-talk] upcoming IPv6 meeting

[Charles Sprickman]

On Mon, 17 Sep 2007, gene cronk wrote:

> I'm trying to keep this one more along the lines of a technical talk, as it
> seems you can go to just about anywhere technical that's giving some sort of
> IPv6 talk and get the "you really need to use IPv6 because of
> blahblahblah".  Nobody's really covering HOW to use it.  I'm attacking it
> from more of a "I want to set this up at home and play" perspective, but I
> will be digging around on how to set it up in a datacenter using standard
> routing/peering protocols.  I'll do my best with the datacenter side stuff,
> but it may not be spot on.  The tunnel and daemon setups, OTOH, will be.

This sounds great.  If you have slides, I'd love it if you could post them 
after the talk.  My excuse for not attending this week is (prepare for 
"too much info") is that that evening is my wife's prep for a colonoscopy 
the next day.  I'm lending moral support.

That said, I'm really bummed to be missing this, as that's exactly what 
I'm looking for.  I've never seen a good tutorial online that covers both 
"howto" and "how it works", and I don't deal well without both of those 
pieces of info.  I mean basics - the addressing, etc.  I'll even share a 
really stupid question right now:

I type "ifconfig" on an ipv6-enabled (but not connected) host and I see 
the following...

inet6 fe80::217:f2ff:fe50:de4c%en1 prefixlen 64 scopeid 0x5

My first thought is, as something of a network guy, is "how the hell do I 
keep that number in my head?" or if eventually you're an ISP and a 
customer calls up how do you tell them to ping their gateway for 
troubleshooting?  "Hi, please tell me if you can  ping 
fe80::217:f2ff:fe50:de4c".  Ouch.  My head can (and does) contain many 
ipv4 addresses - the dotted quad is easy to remember.  v6 addresses, I 
can't see having even one of them in my memory for more than a few 
seconds.  That's my question, if you can call it that.

> You'll be able to take my methods home with you and get a tunnel up that
> night if you wish (or the next day if you've had a couple too many at
> Suspenders....;-)).

Awesome.

> I'm not really going to touch the WHY you should learn it.  Everyone has
> heard that ad nauseum.  If you want to discuss the whys after the meeting,
> cool, but for the most part during the talk I want to stick to the down and
> dirty HOWS.  Sound good to everyone?

I won't be there, but that sounds great to me. :)

Charles

> --Gene
>