North American Network Operators Group

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Re: NANOG 40 agenda posted

  • From: Iljitsch van Beijnum
  • Date: Tue May 29 04:56:04 2007


On 29-mei-2007, at 3:35, Donald Stahl wrote:


Actually setting up a dual-stack infrastructure isn't very difficult-
anyone who has done so would probably agree. The problems (as has
already been pointed out) come from management, billing and the like.

I don't know what kinds of weird management and billing systems are out there, so I won't say that's not relevant, but the most difficult part about IPv6 deployment today is provisioning, in my opinion. If you as a service provider have a router and a customer has a host (or more than one for either) then you can do stateless autoconfig and life is good. However, when the customer has a router then there is no way to make that work automatically without manual configuration similar to what you get now with a CPE that receives a single IPv4 address over PPP or DHCP on the WAN side and does NAT on the LAN side.


Then there is the DNS issue: since you can't predict what addresses your customer's machines are going to have, you can't pre-populate the DNS. DHCP for IPv6 is largely missing in action so that's not a 100% solution. It is possible to have clients register their addresses in the DNS using dynamic DNS updates, but that's not all that widely supported either and either you have no security or you have confused customers. But you can always delegate the reverse DNS to the customer and make it their problem. :-)

Testing now with a small group of technically competent people would seem to be a better idea than waiting until IPv6 is already widely deployed and then trying to test a rollout.

# traceroute6 www.nanog.org traceroute6: hostname nor servname provided, or not known

That would be a start... It took years to get the IETF to eat its own dog food, though.