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

Owen DeLong owen at delong.com
Sat Jun 4 19:08:45 UTC 2011


On Jun 4, 2011, at 1:17 AM, Jeroen Massar wrote:

> 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? :)
> 
While I wasn't there, I have talked to many of them about the subject.

> 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.
> 

Uh, right...

> There are then two possible results:
> - an actual realization at the ISPs that there might be a day
>   that they need to do IPv6

I think most ISPs realize that at this point, therefore, little or nothing
could be gained in this respect by such an action.

> - lawsuits from the ISPs because they got overloaded
>   in their callcenters blabla...

This is absurd. There's no valid cause of action. No content provider
has a duty to prevent calls to an ISP's callcenter and there is no valid
basis for an ISP to argue that Google is liable to them because they
terminated services to their users.

> 
> 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.
> 

Yeah, I'm not seeing the point here or how that would relate to any
rational intent for World IPv6 Day.

> 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.
> 

If you got all the way down to this point before realizing that IPv6-only
day at this stage was a bad idea, then, you weren't paying attention
to your earlier thoughts.

> 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 ;)
> 

If you can type faster than you think, either your fingers are impressively
fast, or, your brain is impressively slow. I'll leave it to you to decide which
applies.

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

Which is exactly the intent... To have minimal impact, increase IPv6
deployment and awareness, and identify places where things do
break.

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

Right, but those folks also already have a visible effect that they
can debug.

> - 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.
> 

Many of those folks don't go to the sites where they have issues and
so are unaware of the issues. This provides an opportunity to identify
and correct a much larger portion of those.

Finally, I think we need to make a differentiation here that you are
not making. I already have IPv6 enabled, but, I have none of the
issues you describe above because my IPv6 is working. The
real issue is folks who have all of the following:

	+	IPv6 enabled
	+	Machines that think they have a legitimate IPv6 next-hop
		to the destination
	+	The IPv6 next-hop is not working

or folks who have:

	+	IPv6 connectivity
	+	Broken DNS resolvers in their path that do not properly
		pass along AAAA records.

> - 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.
> 

True, but, these folks are not a reason that <content provider> cannot
turn on AAAA records.

> 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 ;)
> 

Actually, there are lots of folks running default OS configurations where
their OS has decided they have an IPv6 default route or such and will
experience problems. They are a trivially small percentage (0.1% or
less) of the population by most estimates, but, that's enough to prevent
some of the large content providers from deploying AAAA records
on their services at this time.

Thus, the point of W6D is to provide a safe-harbour day when all the
content providers can jump into the same pool together so that it doesn't
look like just one of them is broken to that subset of users. This will
allow us to better:

	+	Scope the problem
	+	Identify the affected users
	+	Look at possible mitigation strategies
	+	Measure and quantify the extent of the problem

> 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.
> 

Agreed, but, this broken connectivity case is currently a stumbling block
to getting major content providers on to dual-stack, so, if we can get
data that allows us to work past that point, it's a pretty big win.

In all of my discussions with the W6D organizers, this has always been
the stated intent and expected benefit expressed by them. As such, I
simply don't see how v6 only would ever have fit into that plan.

Owen





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