If you work for a university, government agency, retailer or any other company with a content-heavy website, then your organization is probably considering when and how to make the site and applications available over IPv6. Clint Ecker at Ars Technica offers a basic blueprint for making the transition.

The first thing to do is figure out your objectives for moving to IPv6. Nobody is quite sure when there will be a financial imperative to make the move, but it may not be long before customers in Asia are given addresses with the new protocol. The transition will involve labor costs for research and implementation in addition to possible expenses in hardware, support, software licenses and downtime.  So before jumping in, you want to weigh those costs against the benefits of increased activity from IPv6 users. Additionally, you may want to consider the benefits of good press and "geek cred," Ecker writes.

Once you know your goals, you begin the transition "at the bottom and work your way up," he advises. You work your way up from your hosting provider, network provider, networking equipment, operating system, web servers, applications and finally to your database or logging system where IP addresses are stored, he writes, describing the process as the "eight circles of IPv6 transition agony." He offers a description of what to look for at each step along the process.

"The key to any IPv6 transition will be determining where and how your applications deal with IP addresses at all," he writes. "Most of the hard work is below this layer in networking equipment and web servers. Most of our systems have no idea about IP addresses and will never have to deal with one."

For more:
- see Chris Ecker's post at Ars Technica

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