IPv6 has been deployed within the Computing Department at Lancaster University for several years as part of our ongoing research activities and during that time, external connectivity has been provided via configured tunnels over the UK academic network to ULCC. However, as part of a recently initiated network upgrade process, Lancaster University’s network operations group, ISS (Information System Services), decided to begin the native deployment of IPv6 across the main campus with the assistance of the Computing department. Indeed, one important motivator for IPv6 deployment at this time was due to the Computing Departments involvement in the 6NET project which represented a good opportunity to get useful additional support throughout the process.

Following the 6NET IPv6 management seminar in October 2004, which was attended by members of ISS, we began the collaborative process of planning the deployment of a dual stack IPv6 network. The goal of this was initially to provide native IPv6 connectivity to the Computing Department in the new InfoLab21 building before extending it to offer the service on a campus-wide basis. This type of widespread IPv6 deployment impacts on all aspects of the network from the underlying infrastructure to the services and applications run over it and so one of our first tasks was to conduct an analysis of what technologies will be affected by the deployment of IPv6 and what new or existing services will be needed. Once that was completed, the initial IPv6 deployment began and now that this too has been completed, we are ready to begin considering moving on to the next stage in the deployment process.

The aims in writing this section are therefore both to document the progress that has been made to date and to highlight the major issues that have been encountered and what solutions have been used to overcome them. In many cases, the issues that arose were the result of missing IPv6 support within deployed hardware or software and so we can (hopefully) expect this to be largely resolved in the near future as the wider deployment process continues. They are all currently however important considerations for those contemplating IPv6 deployments in the Enterprise, and particularly the campus scope, at this point in time.