IPv6 Wow

Mon Oct 13 02:46:52 UTC 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?