Network Development Team

Our targets for the IPv6 deployment for this week have been mostly successful

• Enabling IPv6 to first half and now the second half of the OUCS server room has been completed, we’ve had no complaints of disruption from other teams so this appears successful.
• All our development hosts are now IPv6 enabled. These were the first hosts enabled which was useful for setting up our configuration management systems handling of IPv6.
• Two of our four IPv4 stratum 3 NTP servers are now IPv6 enabled, providing a live service currently at ntp6.oucs.ox.ac.uk. In months to come I suspect we’ll add AAAA records for ntp.oucs.ox.ac.uk however for now we’re being cautious.
• At IT support staff request the IRC service at irc.ox.ac.uk has been IPv6 enabled ahead of schedule. This was more rushed than I would have liked but we were able to test on a development host and the change was completed with the service live without downtime or disconnections. Sadly the jabber/xmpp service which is present on the same physical server received less testing and wasn’t successfully IPv6 enabled, AAAA records for this service have been removed until time can be set aside for proper testing and deployment. For this service (which is mainly used by IT Support Staff) we decided to add AAAA records for the normal service address (rather than use, say, irc6.ox.ac.uk) but haven’t seen any reported issues yet.
• Our teams main database server has been IPv6 enabled, this is not a direct service to IT support staff but provides information to many of the tools and backend processes.

The following were originally planned for this morning but are behind schedule:

• IPv6 enabling the webcache service – this simply hasn’t had time set to it due to other demands. It’s reasonably straightforward (a little Squid configuration, some ip6tables work, some testing) but I don’t believe the migration should be done live like the irc.ox.ac.uk service was and although little used nowadays it has a larger number of users than the irc service.
• Outside the IPv6 project the migration of one of the university main DNS servers to new hardware will be delayed. It was ready on time this morning but I’d like to do more testing before deploying, I wasn’t comfortable that it had been tested enough.

So my work for the next four days is

1. Testing the replacement DNS server with the aim to deploying in next weeks Tuesday slot instead (21st September)
2. Planning/preparation for IPv6 enabling the webcache in the same slot
3. IPv6 enabling the host that provides our team website IT support staff use for internal network facilities, this is also a IPv4 NTP stratum 3 host so we can add it to the ntp6.oucs.ox.ac.uk service once enabled.
4. Ahead of schedule, adding the network monitoring system host itself to IPv6 as it’s also a IPv4 stratum 3 NTP host, but probably not doing any work on monitoring via IPv6 until the planned date due to time.