North American Network Operators Group
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Re: Apple Airport Extreme IPv6 problems?

  • From: Barrett Lyon
  • Date: Mon Sep 17 21:48:29 2007 


Getting back to my original discussion with Barrett, what should we do
about naming? I initially though that segregating v6 in a subdomain
was a good idea, but if this is truly a migration, v4 should be the
interface segregated.

Personally I find separation of the A/AAAA somewhat of a dysfunctional way to deal with this issue. Users that opt-in to dual-stack will be accepting of the downfalls in the v6 deployments out there. In that case, it should be fine to provide a seamless experience with overlapping DNS records.

However, users are not getting a choice or even an education on what is happening on the tunnel and are getting impacted from overlapping AAAA/A records. This is the breakdown, I think that if we start segmenting DNS to fix a symptom and not the problem itself, we're just adding more ducktape.

I would actually think Apple (and any other vendor that default enable v6 tunnels without notifying the user) should react to this and provide a fix that allows their current user base to opt-in to their pre-existing tunnels with education on what that means to the user. It's great to be progressive, but it's not good to do it when it can impact users.

Regarding segmented v4/v6 DNS, this may already exist, but it may also be a good idea for the web masters out there to create a v6 logo or marking denoting that a user has reached a v6 page vs. a v4 page. This could also be more helpful and also allow users to choose which protocol is used to reach the site. It also creates a reason to have both an overlapping AAAA/A www. and a special www.v6./w6. and www.v4. alias. If that framework accompanied the overlapping DNS, then HREFs could shuffle users from one version of the site pending on the user preference.

On a totally unrelated note: Not to make any accusation on the security of the end-point tunnel network what-so-ever, but an entirely other issue is the tiny bit of a security conundrum that default tunnels create -- tunneling traffic to another network without notifying the user seems dangerous. If I were a tinfoil-hat security person (or a CSO of a bank for example) this would really freak me out.


-Barrett