Re: IPv6 Wow

* Daniel Senie · * Sun Oct 12 22:47:12 2008

At 06:05 PM 10/12/2008, Nathan Ward wrote:
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.

Not to rain on anyone's parade, but it'd be interesting (and
difficult, unfortunately) to know how many Vista machines are
actually on non-RFC1918 addresses. Corporate users are in many cases
staying with XP for a while, but they're more likely to have public
space than most. A great many home users have a cheap NAT box that
provides RFC1918 addresses.
I do wonder whether where the Vista machines on public IPs really
are. I also have to wonder if performance is really better when those
users are routed over 6to4 in Europe from, say California, or whether
they'd actually get better performance if they stuck in a NAT box,
resulting in their using IPv4 instead?