Why no IPv6-only day (Was: Protocol-41 is not the only tunneling protocol)

Jeroen Massar jeroen at unfix.org
Sat Jun 4 08:17:08 UTC 2011


On 2011-Jun-03 18:20, Owen DeLong wrote:
[..]
> FIrst I've heard of such a thing.

There is a first time for everything ;)

> The original organizers of W6D have zero
> motivation to try such a thing and I can't imagine why they would even
> consider it for more than a picosecond.

As you where not part of that group of folks, how do you think you can
guess what their plans where? :)

But anyway, just consider it: a portion of the major websites go
IPv6-only for 24 hours. What happens is that well, 99% of the populace
can't reach them anymore, as the known ones are down, they start calling
and thus overloading the helpdesks of their ISPs.

There are then two possible results:
 - an actual realization at the ISPs that there might be a day
   that they need to do IPv6
 - lawsuits from the ISPs because they got overloaded
   in their callcenters blabla...

One of the other realizations was something that happened when the
Pirate Bay went IPv6-only as their IPv4 connectivity was broken, people
just appended .sixxs.org to the website and presto, they got the IPv6
version of the Pirate Bay over IPv4, including the torrents mind you.
Now the website itself was not a problem, the amount of traffic from
tracker was though, but blocking torrent clients and adding more boxes
solved that issue mostly.

The other realization was that the burden will quickly fall on sites
which provide IPv6 access, and that is something that will have turned
out in a similar way as the above into a situation that will not work
out positively either.

Just typing the above took longer than a picosecond, but it is always
good to know that there are people who can think that fast and consider
all the options ;)

The current plan of turning on AAAAs will, in my guesses, not have a
major impact though it will break things for some people:

 - folks who have IPv6 enabled already, already have issues with sites
   when their local DNS recursor does not handle AAAA properly.

 - folks who have IPv6 enabled already, already have issues with sites
   when their connectivity is broken, it will now just start breaking
   for sites that they 'rely' on a lot as they use them often, thus they
   will realize that it is broken.

 - folks who don't have IPv6 enabled (XP default mostly) won't notice a
   thing as they have no AAAA support thus nothing will happen.

leaving mostly one group:
 - people who are technically not so clueful but do see in the news all
   the hype about IPv6 and suddenly start wanting it and enable IPv6
   probably ending up trying to set up IPv6 and then breaking it in the
   process. I have seen bunches of folks already getting IPv6 tunnels
   solely for the reason of "being ready for IPv6 day", while they are
   ready if they got working IPv4 and non-broken IPv6 ;)

nevertheless, the broken connectivity case is the one I think will be
seen the most, as the DNS case people should have noticed already if
they have issues with it, and that won't differ from the problems they
already have.

Greets,
 Jeroen




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