Yahoo and IPv6

Tue May 10 18:22:54 UTC 2011

On May 10, 2011, at 9:32 AM, Igor Gashinsky wrote:

> On Tue, 10 May 2011, Valdis.Kletnieks at vt.edu wrote:
> 
> :: On Tue, 10 May 2011 02:17:46 EDT, Igor Gashinsky said:
> :: 
> :: > The time for finger-pointing is over, period, all we are all trying to do 
> :: > now is figure out how to deal with the present (sucky) situation. The 
> :: > current reality is that for a non-insignificant percentage of users when 
> :: > you enable dual-stack, they are gong to drop off the face of the planet. 
> :: > Now, for *you*, 0.026% may be insignificant (and, standalone, that number 
> :: > is insignificant), but for a global content provider that has ~700M users, 
> :: > that's 182 *thousand* users that *you*, *through your actions* just took 
> :: > out.. 182,000 - that is *not* insignificant
> :: 
> :: At any given instant, there's a *lot* more than 182,000 users who are cut off
> :: due to various *IPv4* misconfigurations and issues.
> 
> Yes, but *these* 182,000 users have perfectly working ipv4 connectivity, 
> and you are asking *me* to break them through *my* actions. Sorry, that's 
> simply too many to break for me, without a damn good reason to do so.
> 
In other words, Igor can't turn on AAAA records generally until there are
182,001 IPv6-only users that are broken from his lack of AAAA records.

Given IP address consumption rates in Asia and the lack of available IPv4
resources in Asia, with a traditional growth month to month of nearly
30 million IPv4 addresses consumed, I suspect it will not be long before
the 182,001 broken IPv6 users become relevant.

> Doing that on world ipv6 day, when there is a lot of press, and most other 
> large content players doing the same, *is* a good reason - it may actually 
> has a shot of accomplishing some good, since it may get those users to 
> realize that they are broken, and fix their systems, but outside of flag 
> day, if I enabled AAAA by default for all users, all I'm going to do is 
> send those "broken" users to my competitors who chose not to enable AAAA 
> on their sites. 
> 
Agreed. I think IPv6 day is a great plan for this very reason. I also hope that
a lot of organizations that try things out on IPv6 day will decide that the
brokenness that has been so hyped wasn't actually noticeable and then
leave their AAAA records in place. I do not expect Yahoo or Google to
be among them, but, hopefully a lot of other organizations will do so.

> This is why I think automatic, measurement-based whitelisting/blacklisting 
> to minimize the collateral damage of enabling AAAA is going to be 
> inevitable (with the trigger set to something around 99.99%), and about 
> the only way we see wide-scale IPv6 adoption by content players, outside 
> events like world ipv6 day.
> 
This will be interesting. Personally, I think it will be more along the lines
of when there are more IPv6 only eye-balls with broken IPv4 than there
are IPv4 eye-balls with broken IPv6, AAAA will become the obvious
solution.

In my opinion, this is just a matter of time and will happen much sooner than
I think most people anticipate.

Owen