Multiple vendors' IPv6 issues

David Sotnick sotnickd-nanog at ddv.com
Tue May 26 23:19:25 UTC 2015


Hi NANOG,

The company I work for has no business case for being on the IPv6-Internet.
However, I am an inquisitive person and I am always looking to learn new
things, so about 3 years ago I started down the IPv6 path. This was early
2012.

Fast forward to today. We have a /44 presence for our company's multiple
sites; All our desktop computers have been on the IPv6 Internet since June,
2012 and we have a few AAAAs in our external DNS for some key services —
and, there have been bugs. *Lots* of bugs.

Now, maybe (_maybe_) I can have some sympathy for smaller network companies
(like Arista Networks at the time) to not quite have their act together as
far as IPv6 goes, but for larger, well-established companies to still have
critical IPv6 bugs is just inexcusable!

This month has just been the most disheartening time working with IPv6.

Vendor 1:

Aruba Networks. Upon adding an IPv6 address to start managing our WiFi
controller over IPv6, I receive a call from our Telecom Lead saying that or
WiFi VoIP phones have just gone offline. WHAT? All I did was add an IPv6
address to a management interface which has *nothing* to do with our VoIP
system or SSID, ACLs, policies, roles, etc.

Vendor 2:

Palo Alto Networks: After upgrading our firewalls from a version which has
a nasty bug where the IPv6 neighbor table wasn't being cleaned up properly
(which would overflow the table and break IPv6), we now have a *new* IPv6
neighbor discovery bug where one of our V6-enabled DMZ hosts just falls of
the IPv6 network. The only solution: clear the neighbor table on the Palo
Alto or the client (linux) host.

Vendor 3:

Arista Networks: We are seeing a very similar ND bug with Arista. This one
is slightly more interesting because it only started after upgrading our
Arista EOS code — and it only appears to affect Virtual Machines which are
behind our RedHat Enterprise Virtualization cluster. None of the hundreds
of VMware-connected hosts are affected. The symptom is basically the same
as the Palo Alto bug. Neighbor table gets in some weird state where ND
breaks and the host is unreachable until the neighbor table is cleared.

Oh, and the final straw today, which is *almost* leading me to throw in the
IPv6 towel completely (for now): On certain hosts (VMs), scp'ing a file
over the [Arista] LAN (10 gigabit LAN) takes 5 minutes over IPv6 and <1
second over IPv4. What happened?

It really saddens me that it is still not receiving anywhere near the kind
of QA (partly as a result of lack of adoption) that IPv4 has.

Oh, and let's not forget everybody's "favorite" vendor, Cisco. Why is it,
Cisco, that I have to restart my IPv6 OSPF3 process on my ASA every time my
Palo Alto firewall crashes and fails over, otherwise none of my VPN clients
can connect via IPv6?

Why do you hurt me so, IPv6? I just wanted to be friends, and now I just
want to break up with you. Maybe we can try to be friends again when your
vendors get their shit together.

-David



More information about the NANOG mailing list