Lancaster University is connected to the UK academic network (JANET) via the C&NLMAN regional network, also administered in Lancaster. At the outset, this did not offer native IPv6 but was intended to be made dual stack as a precursor to a deployment within the University. This presented two distinct sets of problems, enabling IPv6 support within C&NLMAN and the subsequent deployment in the University campus. Since the focus of this section is the Enterprise/campus scope, this section focuses primarily on the later except in cases where the deployment of IPv6 in the provider network has implications for the campus deployment. We will first describe the basic topology of the network to outline how this was affected by the deployment of IPv6 and what modifications were necessary to achieve it.

Starting Point

The situation at Lancaster differs from that in other Enterprise networks because in our case ISS is responsible for the management and operation of both the regional MAN and the University network, thus reducing the number of parties involved in the process to two, the Computing Department and ISS. We exclude UKERNA here (who manage the JANET network) because while they are responsible for UK academic IPv6 prefix allocation and core deployments, they were not directly involved in the planning of our IPv6 deployment. This obviously has many advantages and has undoubtedly led to a reduction in the amount and time and effort spent during the planning the deployment process.

As such, while the deployments in C&NLMAN and the University were considered separately (including addressing and routing considerations), the work was conducted almost in parallel, again leading to a reduction in the amount of time taken during the deployment. The original configuration of the network from the UKERNA access point to the InfoLab21 entry-point is shown below (Figure 13-8):

In our case, hardware is supplied from a number of vendors including Cisco, Juniper and Extreme and each device was first tested in a sandbox environment to both determine the extent of IPv6 functionality offered and to allow ISS to familiarise themselves with this aspect of their operation. Unfortunately, while the Juniper and Cisco equipment proved very capable of supporting IPv6, the Extreme devices did not, introducing problems at both the MAN and the University level. In the case of the Computing Department, a BlackDiamond 10k has recently been deployed on which limited IPv6 support is available and full support is promised shortly, unfortunately however the older BlackDiamond 6k devices deployed across the rest of the infrastructure do not currently offer IPv6 support and are unlikely to do so in the immediate future.