Apple Airport Extreme IPv6 problems?

Barrett Lyon blyon at blyon.com
Sat Sep 15 16:05:43 UTC 2007


Apple is nice enough to provide an automatic v6 tunnel from their new  
Airport Extreme units.  They even get all the machines on the network  
to participate -- by default!  At first this did not seem to be much  
of an issue, it was even pretty cool.

However, I noticed as I roll out more v6 services to support native  
v6 users, I am impacting the network performance of almost all of the  
Apple airport population that has an inefficient tunnel  
configuration.  The user obviously will take the AAAA v6 published IP  
over the v4 A record.

Don't get me wrong v6 tunnels are great, when you opt-in and know  
what you are getting into.  For example, my grandparents tunnel in  
California goes to Virginia.  This impacts the user experience rather  
significantly with the first hop being nearly 100ms where their  
services to California are ~20ms.  It's painful for a lot of users,  
especially when they don't even know what's going on.

Has anyone else ran into this?  It's not pretty for a CDN or anyone  
trying to provide a quality service over v6, shunting users over  
inefficiently tunneled routes does not sit well with me.  I think  
Apple has made a mistake by enabling this by default.

-Barrett



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