HP 635n HP Jetdirect Print Servers - Practical IPv6 Deployment for Printing an - Page 4

exploiting IPv6 devices. Attackers will love the network environment which allows for unsecured Dynamic DNS updates. Statement: Given the practical considerations presented thus far, customers should really develop solid migration plans to IPv6. Status: TRUE! Practical Consideration: Given the recent ARIN resolution and the emerging markets for IPv6, many products that a customer will buy will be Dual-Stack out of the box. Essentially, by the end of 2007, IPv6 will be enabled and operational on new workstations with Vista, servers with Windows Server 2008, and newly deployed printers and MFPs as well as many other network devices targeting the IPv6 market. Customers will be deploying these devices in predominately IPv4 environments. Is your network ready for it? If you don't answer this question with an enthusiastic "YES!", then the answer is "NO!" IPv6 is a really big event in the networking world and there are bound to be some hiccups in the deployment of IPv6 in your network. By having a quality migration plan, many of these issues can be solved before support calls come in or at the very least can be handled with minimal impact to productivity. One of the goals of such a plan is to make the user completely unaware what protocol they are using - IPv4 or IPv6. This means that the user application must be IP Neutral. An IP Neutral application means avoiding the user typing in or using IP addresses. What can we use instead? The name of a network device provides a level of indirection that hides the IP address of the device. The importance of names and the process of turning a name into an IP address (or IP addresses!) are discussed next. The Importance of Names and Name Resolution IPv6 addresses are 128 bits in length and to write them out fully requires about 36 characters, as an example 2001:0DB8:0000:0000:789A:BCDE:FDCB:A987. There are shortcut methods to reduce the number of characters to help people remember IPv6 addresses. By using those shortcuts the previous IPv6 address can be reduced to 2001:DB8::789A:BCDE:FDCB:A987, but as you can see an explicit IPv6 address will never be as easy to remember as an IPv4 address. For instance, HP printers can be configured to show the IPv4 address on the control panel of the printer. If a user wants to print to the printer, they often can remember the IPv4 address or quickly write it down on a small piece of paper or even on their hand. As an example, 192.168.214.53 could be the printer's IP address, which isn't too bad to remember. What if the printer's IP address on the control panel showed 2001:DB8::789A:BCDE:FDCB:A987? A user may need to take a picture of the control panel with their cell phone to remember it! What is the alternative to displaying explicit IP addresses? The alternative is to use a network name that describes the device. Almost all networked devices have a name as well as an IP address. For instance, let's assume that a printer displayed on the control panel "BLD3P6" which is short for "Building 3, Pole 6". This name is much easier to remember than IP addresses. The user would then take this name and return to their workstation and enter it into an application. Now, the workstation's application and Operating System work together to resolve the name into an IP address or multiple IP addresses. In most cases, a name will resolve to either: • An IPv4 Address • An IPv4 Address and an IPv6 Address • An IPv6 Address The second case allows for an application to choose either IPv4 or IPv6 or try each address until one works. The application being able to choose which IP address to use is extremely powerful and will make name resolution more important than ever. 4