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IT staff training and motivation

Started by swittstr, July 08, 2010, 08:49:00 AM

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swittstr

Hello All,

We, the Network team, are planning the first IPv6 'talk' with the IT staff at large.  I'm looking for some ideas for introductory ice breakers, say some IPv6 gadget/trinket giveaway, also an introductory IPv6 joke (no "There's no place like ::1" please.)

Does anyone have ideas, gadgets, etc. for helping to communicating the 128 bit long addresses?  I.e., something to facilitate verbal communications of the 128-bit address?  I can see where these addresses will be burdensome and shortcuts like dropping the site prefix will quickly be in fashion.

Any and all ideas are encouraged!

Thank you.
Steve Wittstruck
Colorado School of Mines

cholzhauer

Don't know if you've come across this thread or not

http://www.tunnelbroker.net/forums/index.php?topic=558.0

Don't even know if it's what you're looking for, but I figured I'd through it out there.

swittstr

Thanks cholzhauer for the referral to the forum "What do you call the 16-bit groups of an IPv6 address?" I read through it but nothing authoritatively was concluded (informally perhaps "quad" was the best suggestion.)  I'm wondering if the IPv6 designers even gave thought to facilitating communications of unwieldy IPv6 addresses.

broquea

If time permits, you could get a bunch of exhaustion countdown devices made. We did this for an APNIC and handed them out, so it has been done before. They are about credit card sized and a bit thicker.

swittstr

Thanks broquea for the IPv4 exhaustion 'credit-card' idea.  Similarly, I thought of using the same IPv4 exhaustion widget HE has on it's home page in an introductory slide at our IT staff IPv6 training sessions and also letting IT staff know this widget is available for a variety of Operating Systems from HE here http://ipv6.he.net/statistics/.

jimb

Yeah.  Quad appears to be the most common usage.  Maybe we can start saying "cole" instead of "colon" too to make it as short to say as "dot".  :P

swittstr

On further thought, communicating IPv6 addresses will be done in Hexadecimal so 32 characters will need to be given most of the time (site prefixes may be assumed, and skipped, in some circumstances.)

I'm beginning to think IPv6 address communications will be done when at all possible through electronic media, email or text message e.g.   That may be easy on initial setups but on subsequent troubleshoots email or text message may not available; that's when the spoken word will be relied on.

As an experiment, I just recited the ABC's (26 characters); it took about 15 seconds.  In a real life IPv6 address verbal exchange, you'd have to factor in some pauses, ":"'s, repeats, etc., which could grow the 15 seconds significantly, but even then the verbal exchange doesn't seem as daunting as when considering this address represents 128 bits.

This discussion may seem a little on the light side, but as someone who spends a good portion of his time administering DNS, handing out and reclaiming IP addresses, and troubleshooting with both non-technical and non-networking-IT staff, having clear, efficient communication methods for IPv6 addresses will save me a lot of time, and grief when the miss-communicated address is given or heard.

swittstr

#7
Here are a couple trinket ideas I've come up with (I never said they wouldn't be lame :-})

1) ball point pens with site /48 prefix, e.g. "Company name = 2001:123:456::/48" and/or "IPv6 is coming.  Will you be ready?".

2) I'm attaching a label/sticker I drew up, I'll probably add "Company name = 2001:123:456::/48".

swittstr

I think I've come to the conclusion verbally exchanging IPv6 address isn't going to happen, it's too prone to error.  Either address are electronically communicated or humans will communicate via hostnames and rely on DNS.