Multiple vendors' IPv6 issues

Tony Hain alh-ietf at tndh.net
Wed May 27 06:59:49 UTC 2015


David,

While I agree with you that there is no excuse for the general IPv6 brokenness across all vendors, they are just doing what participants on lists like this one tell them. Name&Shame may help a little, but until a large number of people get serious and stop prioritizing IPv4 in their purchasing demands, the vendors are not going to prioritize IPv6. Until the vendors clearly hear a collective  "we are not buying this product because IPv6 is broken", everyone will get exactly the behavior you are witnessing. 

While I appreciate the challenges you are facing, it is likely that you will be helped by documenting the percentage of IPv6 traffic you see when things do work. While it may not be much now, that can change quickly and will provide internal ammunition when you try to take a stand about refusing to use a product. If your IPv6 percentage  grows anywhere near the 2x/yr rate that Google has been seeing it won't take long before IPv6 is the driving protocol. For fun, project this 
http://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html   forward 4 years and hand it to the vendors that can't get their IPv6 act together. Then ask them how they plan to still be in business at that point ......

Tony


> -----Original Message-----
> From: NANOG [mailto:nanog-bounces at nanog.org] On Behalf Of David
> Sotnick
> Sent: Tuesday, May 26, 2015 4:19 PM
> To: NANOG
> Subject: Multiple vendors' IPv6 issues
> 
> 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




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