IPv6 allocation plan, security, and 6-to-4 conversion

Sun Feb 1 16:38:52 UTC 2015

On Fri, Jan 30, 2015 at 3:23 PM, Tore Anderson <tore at fud.no> wrote:
> Kabel Deutschland, T-Mobile USA, and Facebook are examples of companies
> who have already or are in the process of moving their network
> infrastructure to IPv6-only. Without going bust.

Hi Tore,

T-Mobile uses something called 464XLAT. Don't let the "translation"
part fool you: it's a tunnel. IPv4 in one side, IPv4 out the other.

Kabel Deutschland uses something called "Dual Stack Lite." It's also a
tunnel: the Kabel-owned CPE encapsulates the customer's IPv4 packets
within IPv6 and delivers them to the Kabel's IPv4 carrier NAT box.

So sure, if you don't mind dissembling a little bit you can say that
they moved their "infrastructure" to IPv6-only. In my mind, tunnelling
IPv4 over IPv6 where it both enters and exits the carrier's area of
control as an IPv4 packet doesn't count as "IPv6-only."

On Fri, Jan 30, 2015 at 11:44 AM, Tore Anderson <tore at fud.no> wrote:
> If everyone could just dual-stack their networks, they
> might as well single-stack them on IPv4 instead; there would be no
> point whatsoever in transitioning to IPv6 for anyone.

What do you mean "if"? Carrier NAT means we *can* single-stack on IPv4
for the next 20 to 30 years, if we're so inclined. We'd have to rely
on address markets to move the needed public IPs from low-value
applications to high-value ones. When you take back all the globally
routable IPs assigned to grandma's webmail PC and Joe's cell phone
there are plenty left to support growth in server counts.

Yes, Joe's cell phone really does have that many IPs.<note sarcasm>

Worse, IPv6's promises are falling one by one. You saw an example in
this thread: Eric wants to break up his announcements for traffic
engineering purposes because, as it turns out, one announcement per
ISP isn't actually enough, Registry practices aren't the primary
drivers behind routing disaggregation. That was a bad assumption baked
in to IPv6's addressing strategy.

Years ago I cracked a joke about IPv6: http://bill.herrin.us/network/ipxl.html

These days I don't know whether to laugh or cry.

Regards,
Bill Herrin

-- 
William Herrin ................ herrin at dirtside.com  bill at herrin.us
Owner, Dirtside Systems ......... Web: <http://www.dirtside.com/>