NetWare Retrospective Part 3: Network protocol migration

Worried about the IPv4 to IPv6 migration?

NetWare users had a similar migration when Novell finally got off of IPX and moved to native TCP/IP with the release of NetWare 5.0 on or around 1999. We've done it before. Like the IPv6 transition, it was reasons other than "because it's a good idea" that pushed for the retirement of IPX from the core network. Getting rid of old networking protocols is hard and involves a lot of legacy, so they stick around for a long, long time.

As it happens IPv6 is spookily familiar to old IPX hands, but better in pretty much every way. It's what Novell had in mind back in the 80's, but done right.

  • Dynamic network addressing that doesn't require DHCP.
  • A mechanism for whole-network announcements (SAP in IPX, various multicast methods for IPv6)

Anyway, you have a network protocol you need to eventually retire, but pretty much everything uses it. What do you do? Like the stages of grief, there is a progression at work here:

  1. Ignore it. We're using the old system just fine, it's going to work for the forseeable future, no reason to migrate.
  2. On by default, but disabled manually. The installer asks for the new stuff, but we just turn it off as soon as the system is up. We're not migrating yet.
  3. The WAN link doesn't support the old stuff. Um, crap. Tunnel the old stuff over the new stuff for that link and otherwise... continue to not migrate.
  4. Clients go on-by-default, but disabled manually. New clients are supporting the new stuff, but we disable it manually when we push out new clients. We're not migrating.
  5. Clients get trouble related to protocol negotiation. Thanks to the tunnel there is new stuff out there and clients are finding it, but can't talk to it. Which is creating network delays and causing support tickets. Find ways to disable protocol discovery, push that out to clients.
  6. Internal support says all the manual changes are harshing their workflow, and can we please migrate since everything supports it now anyway. Okay, maybe we can go dual stack now.
  7. Network team asks if they can turn off the old stuff since everything is also using the new stuff. Say no, and revise deploy guides to start disabling the old stuff on clients but keep it on servers just in case.
  8. Network team asks again since the networking vendor has issued a bulletin on this stuff. Audit servers to see if there is any oldstuff usage. Find that the only usage is between the servers themselves and some really old, extremely broken stuff. Replace the broken stuff, turn off old stuff stack on servers.
  9. Migration complete.

At WWU we finished our IPX to IP migration by following this road and it took us something like 7 years to do it.

Ask yourself where you are in your IPv6 implementation. At WWU when I left we'd gotten to step 5 (but didn't have a step 3).

I've done this before, and so have most old NetWare hands. Appeals to best practices and address-space exhaustion won't work as well as you'd hope, feeling the pain of the protocol transition does. Just like we're seeing right now. Migration will happen after operational pain is felt, because people are lazy. We're going to have RFC1918 IPv4 islands hiding behind corporate firewalls for years and years to come, with full migration only happening after devices stop supporting IPv4 at all.

The IPX transition was a private-network only transition since it was never transited over the public Internet. The IPv6 transition is Internet wide, but there are local mitigations that will allow local v4 islands to function for a long, long time. I know this, since I've done it before.