Oh how the world has changed since I started out in the wonderful trade.

We used to have VLANs and subnets; switches, routers and firewalls. People would moan things didn’t work and we did a traceroute to figure out why. We would bash out a fix, and if it broke, we would bash out another. It was the wild west, and that was fun. Cowboy hats were standard issue.

Then along came the bad guys, and with them, the policy doctors. Changes became more structured and requirements became more complex. Environments spiraled out into wider geographical areas and management became less about break fix and more about tightly structured architecture. The industry responded with protocols and toolchains, each with their own use case, and bit by bit, the sector split up into the key areas of WAN, DC and Campus.

This is the first in what will no doubt be a many part series on deploying IPv6. This is a problem I have had to overcome recently, and still to this day I battle with the implementation subtleties. If you find yourself in my shoes, I hope you find this helpful.

So, firstly, you need to consider your architecture. Mine, I am reliably told is totally wrong.

I use ASAs as routers in the campus. Why? Cos shut up - that’s why! I like to maintain user group segmentation, and I also like to maintain security policy quite tightly. Therefore I put all users in VLANs managed by 802.1x, and all those VLANs gateway on an ASA trunk subinterface. I then provide an appropriately sized routed L3 subnets from a site specific IPv4 /21 and have ACLs as access-groups. Voila - policy is maintained at the gateway border.

…for the renegade master!

Blogging is once again on my radar. Why I will never know, but I guess I have missed having the outlet of shouting into the massive empty room that is the interwebs. Its cathartic.

I am actually sitting here quite happily nodding along to Fatboy Slim now. Those were the days.

So, you know what really grinds my gears (no, not Lindsay Lohan), not having enough compute. I spend my days right now buried in VMware vCloud Director, trying to Architect a very old square peg into the newest of round holes.