Problems with NS*.worldnic.com

Tue Apr 26 13:46:57 UTC 2005

At 21:34 -0700 4/25/05, Rodney Joffe wrote:

>The culprit is dig.

Ahh, dig.  What version?  You have to be running the latest at all 
times these days...so many changes...

In my experiences with v6 the problems I have come down two are:

1) Broken testing tools.  (See change 1610 in the BIND CHANGES file for one.)

2) Broken route policy.  (Dasterdly ISP's!)

3) Broken OS API's. (Have we learned nothing since or from Berkeley Sockets?)

#1 - I've had to reevaluate everything I know about debugging since I 
met IPv6.  Now there's an entirely alternate universe of failure to 
consider.

One day I was sitting in RIPE NCC's offices and couldn't 'dig 
@ns.ripe.net'.  So I walked to the ops room and asked, "umm, is your 
big machine down."  After a good laugh, we figured that my Mac was 
trying v6 where v6 wasn't *really* live.

#2 - When I first got real live IPv6 service from a provider, I tried 
tracerouting to all the machines I knew about - the roots as listed 
on root-servers.org, the RIPE machines.  I'd get about halfway there 
and fail.  I asked for reverse traces from the other side and see 
failures about the same place.

We had to work with ISPs to loosen route policies.

#3 - I have seen all sorts of mistakes involving OS's, OS API's, and 
app software API's.  Mapped addresses are mishandled, having more 
than one address to try is something apps don't deal with.  (Like 
they've been force fed one kind of food their entire life, and now 
have to choose from a menu.)

At NANOG last year I related my problems with ssh (choosing v6 over 
v4 - and me assigning the same domain name to two machines, one on a 
v4 net and one on a v6 net).  Stupid me...

The biggest problem was that one type of machine kept dropping its 
statically configured default v6 route.  Packets would get in, but 
they didn't know where to go next.  The machine logged all activity 
as good though...it didn't know.
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Edward Lewis                                                +1-571-434-5468
NeuStar

If you knew what I was thinking, you'd understand what I was saying.