The Department of Work and Pensions, UK has an entire /8

Nick Hilliard nick at foobar.org
Fri Sep 21 16:13:09 UTC 2012


On 21/09/2012 00:47, Tony Hain wrote:
> You are comparing IPv6 to the historical deployment of IPv4. Get with the
> times and realize that CGN/LSN breaks all those wonderful location-aware
> apps people are so into now, not to mention raising the cost for operating
> the network which eventually get charged back to the user. 

Address translation (already commonplace on many networks) is the
consequence of the lack of a scalable addressing model.  Yup, NAT breaks
lots of things.  Piles.  It sucks.

> Nanog in general has a problem taking the myopic viewpoint 'the only thing
> that matters is the network'.

Networking people build and (in some cases) care about networks.  It's not
the job of nanog people to fret about software development.

> The real costs are in app development and
> support

It's certainly one of the costs.  And application developers have only just
begun to realise that they now need to be aware of the network.
Previously, they could just open up sockets and fling data around.  Now
they need to handle protocol failover and multiple connectivity addresses
and the like.  Yep, it's an extra cost point - one which has been
studiously ignored by most ipv6 evangelists over the lifetime of ipv6.

> That depends on your time horizon and budget cycles. If your org suffers
> from the short-term focus imposed by Wall Street,

Most organisations are in this category, not just those beholden to the
whims of Wall Street.

> If operators would put less effort into blocking transition technologies and
> channel that energy into deploying real IPv6, the sorry state wouldn't be
> there.

There are never shortages of fingers when failures happen, whether they be
used for wagging or pointing.

> For all the complaints about 6to4, it was never intended to be the
> mainstay, it was supposed to be the fall back for people that had a lame ISP
> that was not doing anything about IPv6. 

6to4 is full of fail.  Inter-as tunnelling is a bad idea.  Asymmetric
inter-as tunnelling is worse, and asymmetric inter-as tunnelling based on
anycast addresses with no hope of tracing blackholes is complete protocol
fail.

Despite the total failure that it causes the ipv6 world, we couldn't even
agree on v6ops at ietf that 6to4 should be recategorised as historical.  My
facepalm ran over my wtf.

But really, 6to4 is a minor player.

> All the complaining about 6rd-waste
> is just another case of finding excuses because an ISP-deployed-6to4-router
> with a longer than /16 announcement into the IPv6 table does a more
> efficient job, and would not have required new CPE ... Yes that violates a
> one-liner in an RFC, but changing that would have been an easier fix than an
> entirely new protocol definition and allocation policy discussion.

I'm not understanding the 6rd hate here.  Intra-as tunnelling is fine,
because the network operator has control over all points along the way. It
fixes the problem of having eyeball access devices which don't support v6
properly.  Don't hate it - it's useful for some operators, and quite good
for deploying v6 over an older infrastructure.

> So far neither MSFT or AAPL has been willing to push hard on the app
> development community.

This is a generic awareness problem in the developer community and it's not
microsoft's or apple's business to tell them what to do about it.
Deprecating historic APIs is fine, but you cannot force an application
developer to do what they don't want to do.  Software didn't get ported
from ipx and decnet to ipv4 just because the compiler manufacturers nagged
the developers about it.

IPv6 will become commonplace when there is a compelling reason for it to do
so.  History tells us that it won't happen before this point.

Nick





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