North American Network Operators Group

Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical

Re: IPv6 Wow

  • From: Nathan Ward
  • Date: Sun Oct 12 18:05:32 2008

On 13/10/2008, at 9:53 AM, Stephen Sprunk wrote:

Mikael Abrahamsson wrote:
This brings up an interesting question, should we stop announcing our 6to4 relays outside of Europe? Is there consensus in the business how this should be done? I have heard opinions both ways.

I can understand why some folks would say stop, but unfortunately Europe has the closest public 6to4 relays to the US, and our own providers don't seem to want to put any up. That means 6to4 will break for a great many folks who _are_ trying to use IPv6 (like developers trying to get ahead of the curve and make sure their apps don't break when the transition finally happens) but whose providers haven't clued in yet.

I'm sure I sound like a broken record to some, but whenever I see these comments I feel the need to step up and correct them, until I don't see them anymore.


By far the biggest end users of IPv6 are non-experimenters. Real end users, many of whom do not know what an IP address is.

6to4 is enabled by default in Vista - any Vista machine with a non- RFC1918 address will use 6to4. It is also available in some linksys routers, and is enabled by default in Apple Airport Extreme.

(My traceroutes to 192.88.99.1 have a next-to-last hop in Amsterdam, and I'm on one of the largest ISPs in the US, which apparently hasn't figured out 6to4, much less native IPv6.)


There are public 6to4 relays in the US, I guess your provider just has a shorter ASPATH to somewhere in Europe. Unfortunately BGP had no idea of geography :-)

Re. whether to advertise outside your continent, it really depends whether you're trying to achieve 'good enough' connectivity for 100% of people, or really good connectivity for 95% of people.

Perhaps a good way to do it is advertise outside Europe, but have the providers that get your advertisement out there prepend their AS a few times as it leaves. That way, US providers will still prefer US 6to4 relays (ie lower latency) but any who don't get a 192.88.99.0/24 route from the US will us your relay in Europe. Kinda gets you best of both worlds.

--
Nathan Ward