Abstract to be submitted to the ISGC 2012 conference. 
26 Feb to 2 Mar 2012. Taipei, Taiwan.
http://event.twgrid.org/isgc2012/index.html

Version 2

Title:  "From IPv4 to eternity - the HEPiX IPv6 working group"

Track: Security and Networking

Submitting author and speaker:  David Kelsey (STFC)

Other authors: Phil DeMar (FNAL), Thomas Finnern (DESY), David Foster (CERN), 
Bruno Hoeft (KIT), Soumaya Lanouar (EPFL), Edoardo Martelli (CERN), 
Mark Mitchell (Univ Glasgow), Kars Ohrenberg (DESY), 
Andreas Pfeiffer (CERN), Francesco Prelz (INFN), Mario Reale (GARR), 
Julia Rohlfing (KIT), Sandor Rozsa (Caltech), Sabah Salih (Univ Manchester), 
Luuk Uljee (SARA), Ronald van der Pol (SARA), Ramiro Voicu (Caltech), 
Mattias Wadenstein (Univ Umea), Tony Wildish (Princeton University).


Abstract:

The much-heralded exhaustion of the IPv4 networking address space has finally 
started. While many of the research and education networks have been ready 
and poised for years to carry IPv6 traffic, there is a well-known lack 
of academic institutes using the new protocols. One reason for this is an 
obvious lack of pressure due to the extensive use of NAT or that most currently 
still have sufficient IPv4 addresses. More importantly though, the fact is 
that moving your distributed applications to IPv6 involves much more than the 
routing, naming and addressing solutions provided by your campus and national 
networks. Application communties need to perform a full analysis of their 
applications, middleware and tools to confirm how much development work is 
required to use IPv6 and to plan a smooth transition. A new working group of 
HEPiX (http://www.hepix.org) was formed in Spring 2011 to address exactly 
these issues for the High Energy Physics community.

The HEPiX IPv6 Working Group has been investigating the many issues which feed 
into the decision on the timetable for a transition to the use of IPv6 in HEP 
Computing, in particular for the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid 
(http://lcg.web.cern.ch/lcg/). The activities include the analysis and testing 
of the readiness for IPv6 and performance of many different components, 
including the applications, middleware, management and monitoring tools 
essential for HEP computing. A distributed IPv6 testbed has been deployed and 
used for this purpose and we have been working closely with the HEP experiment 
collaborations. The working group is also considering other operational issues 
such as the implications for security arising from a move to IPv6.

This paper describes the work done by the HEPiX IPv6 working group since 
its inception and presents our current conclusions and recommendations.