NANOG 40 agenda posted

Tue May 29 08:46:47 UTC 2007

On 29-mei-2007, at 3:35, Donald Stahl wrote:

> Actually setting up a dual-stack infrastructure isn't very difficult-
> anyone who has done so would probably agree. The problems (as has
> already been pointed out) come from management, billing and the like.

I don't know what kinds of weird management and billing systems are  
out there, so I won't say that's not relevant, but the most difficult  
part about IPv6 deployment today is provisioning, in my opinion. If  
you as a service provider have a router and a customer has a host (or  
more than one for either) then you can do stateless autoconfig and  
life is good. However, when the customer has a router then there is  
no way to make that work automatically without manual configuration  
similar to what you get now with a CPE that receives a single IPv4  
address over PPP or DHCP on the WAN side and does NAT on the LAN side.

Then there is the DNS issue: since you can't predict what addresses  
your customer's machines are going to have, you can't pre-populate  
the DNS. DHCP for IPv6 is largely missing in action so that's not a  
100% solution. It is possible to have clients register their  
addresses in the DNS using dynamic DNS updates, but that's not all  
that widely supported either and either you have no security or you  
have confused customers. But you can always delegate the reverse DNS  
to the customer and make it their problem.  :-)

> Testing now with a small group of technically competent people  
> would seem to be a better idea than waiting until IPv6 is already  
> widely deployed and then trying to test a rollout.

# traceroute6 www.nanog.org
traceroute6: hostname nor servname provided, or not known

That would be a start... It took years to get the IETF to eat its own  
dog food, though.