Yahoo and IPv6

Mon May 9 20:41:50 UTC 2011

On May 9, 2011, at 4:26 PM, Jeff Wheeler wrote:

> This problem is, and always has been, on the access side.  Point your
> fingers that way.

<aol>+1</aol>

I think we're in a stage where the access networks are playing catch-up.

The CPE marketplace is going to see some significant growth in sales in the short term as well.

I'll say that enabling IPv6 in the datacenter and the core is "easy".  Any modern hardware worth the cash you spend on it does native IPv6.  (If the hardware does not, eg: firewalls, etc, please re-read the prior statement).

Putting IPv6 in a datacenter or on a lan is easy.  You put a /64 there, let the host use SLAAC and let the RA magic work.  You talk to the nameserver over your dual-stack (IPv4) side and it's all set.

While there are concerns about people sending bogus RA's and other things, the same is true for anyone putting the router IP address on the main ethernet of a server too.  These all cause problems.

The routing protocols are all there, either with ISIS or OSPFv3.  BGP is there too.  You can even skip over non-IPv6 enabled nodes by doing 6PE if you have MPLS in your network.

I'm hopeful that nobody will see the problems out there on IPv6 day.  They've been dealt with in the 99%+ of the cases already.

The fact that we're talking about something past the decimal point is good IMHO.  I've observed that the top-million sites can't get it better than 99.4% right for a DNS query.  I can break that out by the top-10, 100, 1k, 10k, 100k and show a graph if that's useful.  I think it's "good enough".  I'd like to call out those with broken network elements and suggest they fix them.

I'd like to have native IPv6 at home, but my provider is not ready yet.  "Soon" is my hope.

The fact that it's there in many other places means it's possible.  I'd like to see more progress getting there than finger pointing.  I expect the next 30 days to be a lot of fun getting to IPv6 day, and it to be far less eventful than we worry it will be.

- Jared