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Moving to IPv6 (Was: NANOG 40 agenda posted)

  • From: Jeroen Massar
  • Date: Sun May 27 09:01:53 2007
  • Openpgp: id=333E7C23

Nathan Ward wrote:
> 
> On 27/05/2007, at 11:06 PM, Jeroen Massar wrote:
> 
>> Nathan Ward wrote:
[..]

> Because for IPv6 to be useful to the masses, content is required.

That is something for the content providers to resolve. That is the
other side of the table and they have the 'easy' portion. The problem
for them is having the equipment/software capable of doing it, which
is easy to deploy and test for them. The really big problem is that
there is a case that when you do enable AAAA's on your service that
suddenly there is a possibility that some user can't reach your site
properly anymore as they don't have proper connectivity to your site
over IPv6.

> As I
> alluded to, getting content to move to IPv6 isn't terribly easy, and I
> don't think that proxying/NATing is a great solution, either.

A lot of endusers are using IPv4 NAT already, and indeed that is not a
great solution. Giving them the extra of IPv6 and thus no NAT there is
a good thing.

For NAT's here the biggest problem is simply the point that you can't
directly SSH into that OS you are running on that cool Xen box with 20
different operating systems. Unless you love port forwarding and other
such tricks of course.

>>> If you were an end user, calling up your ISP to get a new DSL line, and
>>> were told you couldn't have an IPv4 address, only IPv6, and "Sorry sir,
>> [..]
>>
>> Your grandma really doesn't know what "IP" is, nor will she ever care.
>> <stuff>
> 
> So, I think I can sum up your reply by saying that your suggestion is to
> provide a lesser service than we do now (v4 NAT, proxies, etc. sound to
> me like lesser service), during the transition period.

No it is an extra service: They get full connectivity over IPv6.
There are not that many ISP's where you, per default, get the amount
of IPv4 addresses you already get, unless you pay them a wad of cash.
In IPv6 ISP's are supposed to provide every end-site a /48. If they
don't then they are not following up on the justification that they
actually requested IPv6 address space under and then they should not
have the space in the first place.

> While I think that some degradation of service is inevitable, I believe
> that it would be better to minimise the lessening of service, and
> shorten the transition period, wouldn't you?

IPv4 will exist for a long long long long time, long after IPv6 is
considered to be the 'standard' way of doing IP. To shorten the
transition period all the 'important' things on the Internet have to
be doing IPv6. But as it is business and it resolves around cash, they
will be doing IPv4 for a long time too. And that is good, as it gives
providers time to move over.

Of course when you don't have any IPv4 addresses any more, you are
quite bitten. So better start moving.

> It occurs to me, and correct me if I'm wrong, but in your model of this
> transition there becomes little benefit to moving customers to IPv6 at
> all if being stuffed behind a v4 NAT or HTTP proxies counts as "Internet
> connectivity". Of course, I'm probably taking your suggestions to an
> extreme there.

They get the benefit of using IPv6 and thus full end to end
connectivity for all their hosts, instead of receiving only 1 single
IPv4 address. I see that as a real improvement, and it is a model that
a lot of people are very happy with in using. It is what all the
tunnel brokers provide and one of the main reasons I see as signup
reason for people signing up to SixXS. Note that there are for some
time already ISP's who put their users behind a NAT per default and as
such those folks can't run any services at all. When they get an IPv6
tunnel, they can do almost* anything they want with their connectivity.

Greets,
 Jeroen

* = abuse is of course never tolerated...

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