Transition Planning for IPv6 as mandated by the US Govt

Tue Mar 18 00:34:52 UTC 2008

On 17/03/2008, at 11:07 PM, <michael.dillon at bt.com> <michael.dillon at bt.com 
 > wrote:
>> If you're providing content or network services on v6 and you
>> don't have both a Teredo and 6to4 relay, you should - there
>> are more v6 users on those two than there are on native
>> v6[1]. Talk to me and I'll give you a pre-built FreeBSD image
>> that does it, boot off compact flash or hard drives. Soekris
>> (~$350USD, incl. power supply and CF card), or regular
>> server/whatever PC.
>
> Pardon me for interfering with your lucrative business here,
> but anyone contemplating running a Teredo relay and 6to4 relay
> should first understand the capacity issues before buying a
> little embedded box to stick in their network.
>
> The ARIN IPv6 wiki has this page
> <http://www.getipv6.info/index.php/First_Steps_for_ISPs>
> which not only gives you a number of options for setting up 6to4 and
> Teredo relays, it also points you to documents which describe
> what these things do so that you can understand how to size them
> and how to manage them. And the ARIN wiki tries to be vendor
> agnostic as well.

Hi Michael,

Giving away code and hardware is quite the opposite of lucrative, let  
me assure you.

I'm not selling anything. Code is freely available. When I've got some  
decent instructions for it I'll post links to NANOG if you like.
To be fair, it's really nothing more than FreeBSD with a couple of  
patches, and Miredo packaged up in a nice-to-deal-with bundle, that  
means you can plug it in today and make it work with 2 or 3 lines of  
config, instead of spending the next 3 years "engineering a solution"  
that the various parts of "the business" agree with - that is,  
assuming they give their engineers time to even think about IPv6, let  
alone engineer for it. Key word: pragmatic.

It moves about 20Mbit/s on a Soekris box, probably more. If you're  
doing more 6to4 and Teredo traffic than that, then well done. How fast  
can you do it on a Cisco (or, whatever) box? Someone lend me some  
hardware for a week and I'd be more than happy to test and publish  
numbers on that.

Soekris was an example of hardware, as that's what I've developed on.  
As I mentioned, it works on regular PC hardware as well - it's just an  
i386 FreeBSD thing.

I've actually given this Soekris hardware away to several ISPs here in  
New Zealand, sponsored by InternetNZ. That's also related to another  
project - when I've got that all written up properly I'll let you  
know. Geoff Huston wrote about it on his ISP column a month or so back.

The reason I do this, is so people at ISPs are deploying these things,  
instead of not because it might not scale at some point in the future.  
If it doesn't suit their needs in terms of scale, I'm more than happy  
to tell them other ways to do it - and have done. Note my comment  
something along the lines of "ask me if you want cisco configs", and  
as I mentioned, this code will run on any i386 box you throw it at.  
I've also got several slide packs with this stuff in it, if people  
want those. I believe they're reachable via the NZNOG website  
somewhere (nznog.org, I think).

Ps. Yes, vendors should do Teredo relay and 6to4 in hardware. If  
you're a vendor and do, tell me, and I'll encourage people to give you  
lots of money.
Pps. I'll reply to those of you who asked me for 6to4 Cisco configs  
and code later today (it's 1.30pm here), I'm just heading off to fix  
some stuff first. That wiki thing Michael posted links to has the  
cisco stuff.

Thanks,

--
Nathan Ward