Hello,
During v6ops and yesterday's plenary, John Brzozowski encouraged us to
use our own technologies for the IETF network with NAT64. This argument
is valid for those who teach computer networks and since RTGWG is
working on enterprise IPv6 multihoming, you might be interested in a
recent experiment we did with our students.
When students learn networking, they should not learn the current state
of affairs but be prepared for the future since they'll only graduate in
a few years. Several years ago, when IPv6 deployment was burgeoning, I
decided to remove IPv4 from my networking 101 open-source textbook
( http://cnp3book.info.ucl.ac.be ). Since then, our students only learn
IPv6 and results are excellent. Once they've learned IPv6, they can
quickly understand how IPv4 works. Hopefully they'll see sunset4 during
their career.
After networking 101, some of your students attend an advanced
networking course. This course combines theory with practice and usually
students do practice after theory to illustrate the theoratical
concepts. This year, we decided to flip the course and start from a
practical problem to see how groups of students can address this problem
with an open mindset and based only on what they've learned from
networking 101 and the information that they will find on the Internet.
During their carreer, they will be forced to learn on the spot anyway
and they should better start early to look at rfcs, internet drafts and
open-source implementations.
The project given to the students was very simple. One of the engineers
responsible for our (IPv4 mainly :-() campus network explained the
architecture and the basic openrational principles that they use.
Olivier Tilmans prepared a virtual machine that mimics our compus
network (basically six routers) and we attached a few virtual machines
to act as servers and clients. The only constraint that we was that the
campus network had two upstream providers each delegating a different
prefix to the campus network.
Then, the students had to :
- define an IPv6 addressing plan for their network
- select, install and configure a routing protocol and make sure that it
was working correctly
- install and configure dhcp servers/ra to distribute addresses
- install and configure DNS servers and resolvers
- install and configure Diffserv-like traffic control
- install and configure ssh and http servers
- install and configure firewall services to protect the network
- think about a solution to monitor the network
[the number of tasks was chosen based on the number of students in each
group]
All student teams had an operation network at the end of the project.
Since we believe in automation and open-source, we required them to
automate their network from day one and several groups have released
their entire project in open-source.
From a teaching viewpoint, entreprise IPv6 multihoming is a very nice
problem. To encourage other educators (and maybe also network engineers
willing to continue to learn) to experiment with IPv6 entreprise
multihoming, we have released all the software developed to create this
project in open-source.
You can find all the details at :
https://github.com/UCL-INGI/lingi2142
You only need a Linux virtual machine provided by Vagrant to reproduce
the experiment. The barrier to experiment with IPv6 entreprise
multihoming is very low.
Selected students projects with reports and code are available from this
repository as well
https://github.com/UCL-INGI/lingi2142/tree/master/student_projects
I encourage you to have a look at the students' reports to see their
final results:
https://github.com/UCL-INGI/lingi2142/blob/master/student_projects/Group1/report-group1.pdf
https://github.com/UCL-INGI/lingi2142/blob/master/student_projects/Group2/LINGI2142___Rapport_Groupe_2.pdf
https://github.com/UCL-INGI/lingi2142/blob/master/student_projects/Group3/report.pdf
Comments and feedback are welcome although the IETF mailing lists may
not be the best place for discussions on software or teaching projects...
Olivier Tilmans and Olivier Bonaventure
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