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The North American IT community's interest in IPv6 has been somewhat lackluster in comparison. With access to almost 70% of the IPv4 address space, IP address shortages have not been a major issue. Consequently, the number of IPv6 related testbeds and experiments, and accordingly, the level of widespread experience with IPv6 pales in contrast to the support and experience found in places like Japan, Korea, and Europe.

In order to rectify this shortcoming, the North American IPv6 Task Force (NAv6TF), in collaboration with the University of New Hampshire Interoperability Lab (UNH-IOL), the Joint Interoperability Test Command (JITC), and the Department of Defense (DoD), is pleased to announce the development of Moonv6.

The Moonv6 project represents the most aggressive IPv6 interoperability and application demonstration event in the North American market to date. Moonv6 will provide a platform for the North American IT community to garner extensive, real world, IPv6 deployment experience. Additionally, it will serve as an opportunity for equipment and application vendors to demonstrate the maturity and robustness of their respective IPv6 implementations to prospective users and adopters of IPv6.

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Moonv6 is a multi-site, IPv6 based network designed to test the interoperability of various vendor-specific IPv6 implementations.

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The actual motivation of Moonv6 was defined at a NAv6TF, U.S. Cyberspace Security Office, and other participants (November 2002), during discussions to determine how serious should the U.S. take IPv6 as a mission. The question posed to the participants was: "Should we treat IPv6 as we did going to the Moon in 1969?" Later when it was decided to investigate how to deploy a U.S. wide IPv6 Network Pilot at a meeting at the University of New Hampshire in March of 2003, including NAv6TF, University of New Hampshire, and Department of Defense principals, the term Moonv6 was selected to name this Network Pilot. Moonv6 is now a world wide inclusive project with many participants.

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Moonv6 is a collaborative project being facilitated by the North American IPv6 Task Force (NAv6TF), the University of New Hampshire Interoperability Lab (UNH-IOL), and the Joint Interoperability Test Command (JITC). The UNH-IOL has overall responsibility for organizing the Moonv6 event.

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Moonv6 is a worldwide event, occurring at multiple locations. The figure below identifies the commercial, academic, and government participating locations.

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The Moonv6 network is a set of native IPv6 connections between sites on the global Internet that will forward packets to other Moonv6 peering sites. Participants can have a native IPv6 connection to the Internet, and Moonv6 will permit IPv6-in-IPv4 tunnel hops for a 90-day period to test on the Moonv6 network, provided the requestor, not Moonv6 administration, defines and administers those tunnels.

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A Moonv6 site is one that forwards packets within the Moonv6 Peering Network and also participates as a Moonv6 site for collaborative testing of IPv6 implementations for interoperability and verification of functions within the IPv6 protocol and architecture. To become a Moonv6 peering network, a network must IPv6 peer with an existing Moonv6 peering network. To become a Moonv6 site, one must connect to an existing Moonv6 peering network.

In addition to the peering network itself, the Moonv6 project also encompasses deployment-style device testing at several network sites. Participants execute rigorous, protocol-specific test plans created under the guidance of telecommunication carriers, service providers and other real network operators. In addition to greatly extending the participants' own R&D efforts, this testing helps to create confidence in the technology and shorten its adoption cycle. For more information about connecting to the Moonv6 project please send mail to: Thomas Peterson, Jim Bound, or Rick Summerhill.

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Moonv6 is designated to bring together industry, government and academia. Moonv6 is an open event and all vendors with IPv6-enabled product are encouraged to participate. Service providers with an IPv6 interest are also encouraged to contribute. There is no participation prerequisite to be affiliated with the US Department of Defense or the UNH-IOL

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Yes. The Moonv6 fee for participation at the UNH-IOL is dependant on the scope of the event. The fee will be used to cover cost incurred by the UNH-IOL to facilitate the Moonv6 event, including connection fees, lab expenses, and supplies (cables, PCs, etc.). Current members of the IPv6 Consortium at the UNH-IOL will receive a participation fee waiver. Contact Erica Johnson for details.

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Yes. All of the Moonv6 Participants are listed on the Moonv6 website. You can see a list of the Vendors and the Participating sites at the following links:

Vendors

Participating sites

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Each vendor will be required to leave a representative platform at a minimum of 2 of the participating sites. Given the large number of sites, some vendors have allocated multiple units for the event. Each vendor is encouraged to provide as many platforms as possible. Equipment is only "on loan" and will be returned at the end of the project.

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The equipment is required to remain in the test lab for the duration of the test event, including the setup period before the test event begins.

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An engineering representative is required to be present at a minimum of one site; although vendors may have an engineering representative at each location their product is present. It is expected that support engineers can remotely configure devices present at the other sites in addition to performing local configuration.

Participants should anticipate sending no more than two representatives to any one site due to limited space and access in some locations. Vendors wishing to send more than two engineers to the UNH-IOL will be required to pay an extra $500.00 USD per engineer.

NOTE: If you are sending a representative to the JITC site, please send security information (including clearance levels) to Captain Duncan (the JITC site coordinator) one month early so he can process any administrative issues. Sending foreign nationals as company representatives to the JITC site is not recommended.

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Phase I:

• Simple Routing Protocols tests for OSPFv3 and BGP-4 in both native and dual-stack mode
• Common Network Applications, such as FTP, TFTP, HTTP, HTTPS, Telnet, SSH and DNS
• Base Specifications, Neighbor Discovery
• Transition Mechanisms
  RFC 2893, RFC 3056 and ISATAP

  Limited testing of security, mobility and advanced Routing Protocol features
  

Phase II:

• Established a fully operational 24x7 IPv6 network for IPv6 deployment testing
• UNH-IOL obtained a unique AS number and is a BGP peer with AT&T and Internet2
• Refined and added to test scenarios from Phase I, longer testing period with local and wide area testing
• Significant convergence testing of OSPF, BGP and IS-IS
• QoS and multicast proof of concept testing
• Simple Firewall Functionality tests

November 2004 Test Set:

• Routing Convergence
• Firewall Functionality and Access Policy
• DHCP and DNS Testing
• VoIP Demonstration
• iSCSI Demonstration

April 2005 Test Set:

• MCI Backbone provided essential transport
• MAE West hosted IPv6 application servers
• Applications provided by
  France Telecom: ePresentation
  Panasonic: Web-enabled cameras

  MCI engineers ran extra testing

December 2005 Test Set:

• IPSec testing using IKEv1
• VoIP Demonstration
• Network-level mobility testing
• Firewall functionality
• DHCP and DNS testing

July 2006 Test Set:

• DHCPv6 Interoperability Testing
  Stateful and Stateless
  Prefix Delegation

  IPSec Interoperability Testing

  Tunnel Mode

  Transport Mode

  Fragmentation

  DNS

  Transition Mechanism

  Applications Testing

  IPv6 Routing

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The interoperability focus will be on:

• Routing

  Detailed QoS measurements

• Firewall

  Attack Scenarios

  Routing Protocols

  VoIP

  IDS/IPS

• Various encrypted tunnels for IPv6, including IPSec
• PPPoE and IPv6 Radius Servers
• Mobile IPv6

  Complex Topologies

• Further DHCP and DNS interaction
• Proxy Servers
• Mail Servers
• Transition Mechanisms
• eConferencing and eLearning

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Test items are determined by network operation requirements of the US Government Agencies and commercial service providers. The Test Plans from the previous Moonv6 events are available for the public to view on the Moonv6 website: Project

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The UNH-IOL will publish a White Paper with the Moonv6 testing results. This will be a generic list of issues encountered, temporary solutions (if any) and long-term solutions. It will also document the methodologies used in the testing and the network topologies. You can view all press release information on the Moonv6 website: Press

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No. Vendor specific results will be kept private. For reference, the UNH-IOL will document specific device behavior and may privately contact individual vendors for an explanation of issues after the event. All participants are required to sign a non-disclosure agreement prior to the event.

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Erica Johnson (UNH-IOL)
Desk: +1-603-862-0117
Email: erica.johnson@iol.unh.edu

Captain Jeremy Duncan (JITC)
Desk: +1-520-533-0154
Mobile: +1-520-249-6205
Email: duncanr@fhu.disa.smil.mil