Geographic map of IPv6 availability

Thu Oct 11 20:43:56 UTC 2007

Nathan Ward wrote:
> On 6/10/2007, at 3:18 AM, Stephen Wilcox wrote:
> > <stuff>
> > Given the above, I think there is no myth.. !
> 
> That's because the 'v6 network' is broken enough that putting AAAA
> records on sites that need to be well reachable is a bad idea.
> 
> For example, due mainly to Vista's 6to4 tunnelling stuff (based on
> researching a random sample of users), I'd lose about 4% of visitors
> to my web-sites if I were to turn on AAAA records.
> 
> For a transit provider, having an unreachable (or seemingly
> unreachable) web-site is a really bad idea.
> 

So why didn't you put up a 6to4 router and put AAAA records in that pointed
to the 6to4 prefix for those servers? Is the concept of multiple IPv6
addresses on the server really as scary as people make it out to be? After
all by having an IPv4 and an IPv6 address you already have multiple
addresses on the server, so what is one more? 

The entire finger-pointing fiasco between the infrastructure providers and
the content providers has to stop. The content providers just have to ignore
the lethargic infrastructure providers and tunnel over them. Tunneling IPv4
over voice is how we got around the lethargy before, so now the only
difference is we are tunneling IPv6 over IPv4. I hear whining from content
providers about how 6to4, or tunneling in general, is bad because the path
is not predictable. They never stop to realize that they could avoid that
problem by putting up their own tunnel endpoint and through the magic of DNS
completely avoid the problem they are complaining about. The only reason
clients will look for a public 6to4 relay is to find sites that insist on
having a single IPv6 address from a formal RIR IPv6 assignment process. In
the grand scheme of things the 6to4 prefix that would correspond to your
6to4 router is formally assigned, it is just through the IPv4 assignment
process. In any case a 6to4 connected client will traverse the direct IPv4
path to the server's 6to4 router, so as I said earlier if content providers
would just ignore the infrastructure and deploy their own 6to4 routers to
tunnel over the top, we could move forward.

Eventually the carriers will figure out that their customers have moved on
without them, and they will grudgingly come to the party.

Tony 