A student-led IPv6 deployment at NITK Karnataka

In this episode of PING, Vanessa Fernandez and Kavya Bhat, two students from the National Institute of Technology Karnataka (NITK) discuss the student led, multi-year project to deploy IPv6 at their campus. Kavya & Vanessa have just graduated, and are moving into their next stages of work and study in computer sciences and network engineering.

Across 2023 and 2024 they were able to attend IETF118 and IETF119 and present on their project and it’s experiences to the IPv6 working groups and off-Working Group meetings, in part funded by the APNIC ISIF Project and the APNIC Foundation.

This multi-year project is supervised by the NITK Centre for Open-source Software and Hardware (COSH) and has outside review from Dhruv Dhody (ISOC) and Nalini Elkins (Inside Products inc). Former students have also acted as alumni and remain involved in the project as it progresses.

We often focus on IPv6 deployment at scale in the telco sector, or experiences with small deployments in labs, but another side of the IPv6 experience is the large campus network, in scale equivalent to a significant factory or government department deployment but in this case undertaken by volunteer staff, with little or no prior experience of networking technology. Vanessa and Kavya talk about their time on the project, and what they got to present at IETF.

Read more information on the NITK and their IPv6 deployment project on the APNIC Blog, the IETF website and the APNIC Foundation pages:

• Migrating the NITK Surathkal Campus Network to IPv6 (APNIC Foundation)
• How Deploying IPv6 at NITK Led me to IETF (Vanessa Fernandez, APNIC Blog)
• IPv6 Deployment at NITK (IETF118 Presentation)