RIPE NCC IPv6 Training Initiatives and What They Mean for Your Network

IPv6 is no longer a future project you can keep pushing to “next quarter”. In Europe, the Middle East and parts of Central Asia, more and more networks are already dual-stack or even IPv6-first. At the center of this shift sits RIPE NCC, the Regional Internet Registry (RIR) for our region, which not only allocates IP addresses but also invests heavily in training engineers, ISPs, hosting providers and enterprises on how to deploy IPv6 correctly. As a hosting provider operating in this region, we follow RIPE NCC’s IPv6 training initiatives closely and apply what we learn directly to our infrastructure at dchost.com.

In this article, we will walk through the main IPv6 training programs RIPE NCC offers, how they are structured, and why they matter whether you manage a single VPS or an entire data center. We will also translate those trainings into a practical, step-by-step view: what you should actually do on your routers, DNS, web servers and email stack after you or your team complete these courses. If you are planning your IPv6 roadmap, or you just want to understand what RIPE NCC is doing to accelerate adoption, this guide is designed to give you a clear, actionable overview.

Why RIPE NCC Puts So Much Effort into IPv6 Training

To understand why RIPE NCC runs such extensive IPv6 training, you have to look at the bigger picture: IPv4 exhaustion, price surges and long-term scalability. IPv4 address space in the RIPE region has been fully allocated since 2019. Any remaining space is minimal and comes with strict policies or high transfer costs. If you have been following market trends, you have already seen how IPv4 address prices are hitting record highs and driving infrastructure decisions.

RIPE NCC has a dual responsibility: manage the IP registry fairly and support the Internet community in keeping the network scalable. Pushing everyone to fight over remaining IPv4 blocks would be a dead end. That is why RIPE NCC not only encourages IPv6 adoption with policies and measurements, but also invests in practical knowledge: training courses, e-learning, webinars, certification programs and technical documentation that help operators deploy IPv6 in a real-world environment.

From our perspective at dchost.com, this training work is directly visible. Many of the “best practices” we apply when designing dual-stack hosting, configuring BGP on our edge routers, or enabling AAAA records and IPv6 on VPS templates are drawn from materials, labs and checklists that RIPE NCC trainers use in these initiatives. The goal is simple: make IPv6 predictable, testable and boringly reliable, so that you can enable it on your infrastructure without drama.

Overview of RIPE NCC IPv6 Training Initiatives

RIPE NCC’s IPv6 training portfolio has evolved into a mix of in-person, virtual and on-demand formats that together cover everyone from beginners to experienced network architects. The core components typically include:

• Face-to-face training courses in member countries, focusing on hands-on IPv6 deployment for ISPs, enterprises and hosting providers.
• Live webinars on specific topics such as IPv6 routing, security, address planning or transition mechanisms.
• RIPE NCC Academy, an online e-learning platform offering self-paced IPv6 courses, quizzes and labs.
• RIPE NCC Certified Professionals exams for roles like “IPv6 Fundamentals – Analyst” and “IPv6 Security Expert”.
• Documentation, labs and tools (including measurements like IPv6 RIPEness) to benchmark and improve deployment.

Let’s look at the key IPv6-related tracks and what they focus on.

IPv6 Fundamentals and Addressing Basics

The entry point for many engineers is RIPE NCC’s IPv6 fundamentals training. This covers the building blocks you need before touching a router configuration or server interface:

• Why IPv6 was designed (header simplification, address space, autoconfiguration)
• IPv6 address structure: global unicast, link-local, unique local addresses (ULA)
• Prefix lengths (/32, /48, /56, /64) and what they mean for allocations and subnets
• Address notation (shortening rules, zero compression) and avoiding common mistakes
• Neighbor Discovery (ND), SLAAC, DHCPv6 and how hosts get their addresses

For a hosting environment, this is where you learn why every interface should get a /64 instead of trying to “save” addresses as you did with IPv4, and how customer-friendly allocations (for example, giving a small business a /48) help long-term growth. When we planned our own IPv6 ranges for shared hosting and VPS networks at dchost.com, these exact address planning principles guided how we carved our prefixes.

IPv6 for ISPs, LIRs and Hosting Networks

Beyond the fundamentals, RIPE NCC runs training that targets Local Internet Registries (LIRs) and network operators who actually announce and route IPv6:

• Requesting and managing IPv6 allocations from RIPE NCC
• Designing aggregation-friendly address plans for multiple PoPs and data centers
• BGP for IPv6: announcing your prefixes, filtering rules, route objects and RPKI
• Transition mechanisms: dual-stack, NAT64/DNS64, 6rd, tunneling and where they fit
• Monitoring IPv6 reachability and troubleshooting routing issues

This is the level most hosting and transit providers operate at. If you own your own ASN or plan to, the guidelines from these sessions are crucial. For example, RIPE NCC strongly encourages simple, aggregated announcements rather than leaking many small more-specific prefixes, which keeps global routing tables clean and your BGP configurations manageable.

IPv6 Security and Operational Stability

Security concerns often delay IPv6 rollout. RIPE NCC’s IPv6 security courses aim to remove that fear by showing the real risks and the practical mitigations:

• How IPv6 changes your attack surface (larger subnets, different discovery mechanisms)
• Firewalling in an IPv6 world: stateful ACLs, ICMPv6 handling, RA-Guard, uRPF
• Hardening Neighbor Discovery and protecting against spoofed Router Advertisements
• Logging, incident response and monitoring with dual-stack networks
• Best practices for exposing services publicly (web, email, APIs) over IPv6

Many of the firewall rules and IPv6-specific protections we apply to our VPS and dedicated server platforms are directly aligned with these recommendations. If you want a practical view on IPv6 firewalls, our own guide on nftables firewall configuration for VPS with IPv6 rules is a good companion to those trainings.

Online Academy and Certification Paths

Not everyone can attend in-person workshops, so RIPE NCC built the RIPE NCC Academy with self-paced IPv6 modules and labs. These often cover the same material as on-site courses but in a format that you can complete in your own time. For engineers who want formal recognition, RIPE NCC offers exams to become a “RIPE NCC Certified Professional” in topics like IPv6 Fundamentals or IPv6 Security.

From a team perspective, this is extremely useful. In our operations group at dchost.com, we set internal training goals mapped to these certifications. When onboarding new network engineers who will work on our BGP and data center networks, we often ask them to complete specific RIPE NCC IPv6 courses within their first months. It gives everyone a common vocabulary and baseline, which makes design discussions and incident handling smoother.

How RIPE NCC IPv6 Training Translates to Hosting Reality

IPv6 training is only valuable if it changes how you design and operate your infrastructure. Let’s map typical RIPE NCC IPv6 training topics to concrete hosting decisions you might be making today.

Address Planning for web hosting and VPS

RIPE NCC trainings emphasize hierarchical, aggregation-friendly address planning. In practice, that means:

• Reserving dedicated IPv6 blocks for each data center or PoP.
• Giving each customer-facing LAN or VLAN a full /64, not smaller prefixes.
• Documenting your plan carefully to avoid overlapping or fragmented allocations.

When we designed our own layout, we aligned each rack, hypervisor cluster or VLAN with clean /64 boundaries. This makes it straightforward to assign IPv6 addresses to new VPS instances and dedicated servers, and it avoids the “jigsaw” problem where you cannot grow a subnet without renumbering everything.

Dual-Stack Web and Application Servers

Most RIPE NCC materials are realistic: the world will be dual-stack for a long time. That means your web, API and application servers typically run both IPv4 and IPv6. The training covers:

• Configuring dual-stack on Linux interfaces (static addressing vs RA/DHCPv6)
• Enabling IPv6 listeners on Nginx, Apache and other web servers
• Publishing AAAA records in DNS and testing reachability
• Avoiding IPv6 “black holes” when routing or firewalling is misconfigured

If you are planning your own transition, we recommend pairing RIPE NCC’s conceptual trainings with a practical how-to like our IPv6 setup and configuration guide for your VPS server. Together, they give you both the “why” and the “how” without guesswork.

DNS and Email Over IPv6

RIPE NCC trainings also touch DNS and email, because they are critical for a smooth IPv6 experience:

• Running authoritative DNS servers on IPv6 and adding AAAA glue records
• Ensuring resolvers and forwarders work over IPv6 and are reachable
• Enabling IPv6 on mail transfer agents (MTAs) and adjusting SPF, DKIM and DMARC records
• Understanding how spam filters and blocklists treat IPv6 senders

We see many operators feel comfortable with IPv6 web traffic but hesitate on email. To bridge that gap, we have shared a hands-on playbook on email deliverability over IPv6, PTR, HELO, SPF and blocklists, which complements what you learn in RIPE NCC material with real-world sending strategies.

Routing, RPKI and Peering Decisions

For networks that announce their own prefixes, RIPE NCC’s IPv6 trainings go deep into routing and security:

• Creating correct route objects in the RIPE Database for your IPv6 prefixes
• Setting up RPKI Route Origin Authorisations (ROAs) to protect announcements
• Peering policies for IPv6 and monitoring with RIPE Atlas or other tools
• Using BGP communities and filtering to keep your IPv6 routing clean

While customers of our shared hosting or VPS plans do not manage these aspects directly, they benefit from the fact that our upstream connectivity, peering and RPKI practices are aligned with RIPE NCC guidance. This is part of how we ensure stable IPv6 reachability for your services.

Using RIPE NCC Training to Build Your Own IPv6 Roadmap

One of the strengths of RIPE NCC’s IPv6 training initiatives is that they are structured to match a realistic adoption journey, not a one-time “big bang” migration. Based on how these trainings are built, you can structure your own roadmap into clear phases.

Phase 1: Learn and Audit

Start by building internal knowledge and understanding your current state:

• Have your team complete “IPv6 Fundamentals” on the RIPE NCC Academy.
• Attend a webinar or in-person session about IPv6 for ISPs or hosting providers.
• Audit your existing network: routers, switches, firewalls, virtualisation, OS templates.
• Check which components are IPv6-ready and which require firmware or software upgrades.

In this phase, your goal is not to change anything yet, but to create a realistic picture. Our article on rising IPv6 adoption rates and what they mean for your infrastructure can help you benchmark how urgent your own adoption timeline should be.

Phase 2: Design Addressing and Core Network

Next, apply the address planning best practices RIPE NCC teaches:

• Request or review your IPv6 allocation from RIPE NCC.
• Design a hierarchical plan: region → data center → rack/VLAN → /64 per subnet.
• Decide how you will assign IPv6 to customers: static addresses, delegated prefixes, or both.
• Prepare BGP and RPKI configurations for your core and edge routers.

This is also where you decide your transition strategy: dual-stack across the board, or selective IPv6-only segments with NAT64/DNS64 for legacy IPv4 access. If you are curious about operational experiences in this area, our story on running IPv6-only VPS with NAT64/DNS64 for IPv4 access offers a detailed look.

Phase 3: Pilot on Internal Services and Non-Critical Sites

RIPE NCC trainers often recommend starting with less critical services and internal tooling:

• Enable IPv6 on internal monitoring, ticketing or documentation systems.
• Turn on dual-stack for a few non-critical websites or staging environments.
• Set up IPv6 on your internal DNS resolvers and authoritative servers.
• Document issues and refine firewall, routing and monitoring configurations.

This phase is where you turn theoretical lab experience into production wisdom. You can also use tools like RIPE Atlas measurements and third-party IPv6 readiness checkers to validate your setup.

Phase 4: Customer-Facing Rollout

Once your pilot is stable, expand to customer-facing services:

• Offer IPv6 on shared hosting, VPS and dedicated servers by default.
• Publish AAAA records for primary domains and key APIs.
• Enable IPv6 in your email infrastructure and update related DNS records (SPF, PTR, etc.).
• Communicate clearly with customers about what is changing and how to test.

At dchost.com, we treat IPv6 as a core capability, not an optional add-on. For customers who want to go deeper, we recommend combining RIPE NCC training materials with our own hands-on articles like our dual-stack AAAA record playbook, which focuses on real-world DNS and web server changes.

Phase 5: Optimisation, Security and Automation

After your initial rollout, RIPE NCC’s advanced IPv6 trainings on security, automation and operations become more relevant:

• Review firewall rules with a focus on IPv6-specific mechanisms (ND, RA, ICMPv6).
• Automate IPv6 address assignments and DNS updates in your provisioning workflows.
• Integrate IPv6 metrics and alerts into your monitoring stack.
• Consider IPv6-only microservices or back-end networks where appropriate.

Here, you are moving from “IPv6 works” to “IPv6 is efficient, secure and boring” – the state you really want. Our broader infrastructure guides, such as VPS monitoring and alerting with Prometheus and Grafana, can help you extend your observability stack to cover IPv6 in a consistent way.

Practical Tips to Get the Most From RIPE NCC IPv6 Training

Training alone does not change networks; people and processes do. Over time, we have found some practical ways to extract maximum value from RIPE NCC’s IPv6 initiatives and turn them into real improvements in our hosting environment.

1. Treat Training as a Team Sport

Instead of sending a single “IPv6 champion” to a course, try to involve representatives from network, systems, security and support. IPv6 touches everything from router configs to web server vhosts and support documentation. When multiple roles attend the same RIPE NCC training, they come back with a shared vocabulary and aligned mental model, which reduces friction during rollout.

2. Convert Each Course into Internal Checklists

After every major training, we write internal runbooks and checklists. For example:

• An “IPv6-ready router” checklist based on RIPE NCC’s BGP and security modules.
• A “dual-stack web server” template that captures all the vhost and firewall changes.
• A “support script” with steps to troubleshoot common IPv6 connectivity issues.

This mirrors what we already do for SSL/TLS updates and security hardening. If you are interested in that side of operations, you might like our detailed guide on keeping SSL/TLS settings on your servers up to date – the same checklist mentality works very well for IPv6.

3. Align IPv6 Training with Your Product Roadmap

RIPE NCC’s IPv6 initiatives are most valuable when paired with concrete product goals. For example:

• Planning to launch a new VPS line? Make IPv6 support part of the baseline requirement.
• Building a new multi-region architecture? Design IPv6 addressing and routing from day one.
• Rolling out a new security policy? Ensure IPv6 firewall and logging rules match IPv4.

On our side, each new product family at dchost.com goes through an “IPv6 readiness” review that borrows heavily from RIPE NCC guidance. That prevents us from shipping anything IPv4-only that will become technical debt later.

4. Use RIPE NCC Measurements to Validate Your Work

Training is one thing; proof is another. RIPE NCC offers community tools such as RIPE Atlas and IPv6 RIPEness statistics to help you measure how well your IPv6 deployment works in the real world. Combining those with your own monitoring and third-party tests gives you a 360° view:

• Is your IPv6 prefix visible and stable across key vantage points?
• Do your websites respond over IPv6 as quickly as over IPv4?
• Are there any regions or networks where IPv6 reachability breaks down?

We feed this kind of data into our capacity planning and reliability reviews. That way, IPv6 is not just “enabled” but is held to the same uptime and performance standards as IPv4.

What This Means for You as a dchost.com Customer

All of this training and planning activity would be meaningless if it did not simplify your life as a customer. So what does RIPE NCC’s IPv6 training work – and our participation in that ecosystem – actually mean for your day-to-day hosting and network decisions?

• Cleaner address plans and routing: Because we follow RIPE NCC address planning and BGP best practices, your VPS, dedicated servers and hosted sites get predictable, documented IPv6 assignments that are easy to integrate into your own network.
• Safer IPv6 security posture: Firewall rules, ICMPv6 handling, RA protection and logging are designed using guidance from IPv6 security trainings, reducing the “unknowns” when you turn IPv6 on.
• Dual-stack by design: Web, DNS and email stacks are architected to handle both IPv4 and IPv6 cleanly, so you can benefit from IPv6 adoption without breaking legacy clients.
• Support that understands IPv6: Our team is trained to troubleshoot dual-stack issues, not just IPv4, which shortens resolution times when you open a ticket about reachability or DNS.

If you are planning a new project or migration, and you want to use IPv6 from the outset, we can help translate RIPE NCC best practices into a concrete hosting architecture: which type of plan fits, how to structure your DNS and IP allocations, and what changes your developers actually need to make in application configs.

Conclusion: Turning RIPE NCC IPv6 Training into Real-World Reliability

RIPE NCC’s IPv6 training initiatives are much more than a collection of slides and webinars. They form the backbone of how our region is learning to run an Internet that can keep growing, even as IPv4 addresses become scarce and expensive. By covering fundamentals, routing, security, DNS, email and operations, these trainings give network and hosting teams a shared playbook that reduces guesswork and makes IPv6 deployment routine.

At dchost.com, we actively integrate those lessons into how we design and run our infrastructure: from address planning in our data centers to BGP announcements, from IPv6-ready web and mail stacks to the runbooks our support team uses daily. If you are still at the planning stage, exploring dual-stack for an existing site, or considering an IPv6-first architecture for a new project, now is the time to align your roadmap with what RIPE NCC is teaching the broader community.

If you want to discuss how to put these principles into practice on concrete services – shared hosting, VPS, dedicated servers or colocation – our team is happy to help you design an IPv6 strategy that fits your real traffic, applications and timelines. The training work has already been done; the next step is simply to turn it into a stable, fast and future-proof network for your business.