Yahoo and IPv6

Tue May 10 10:03:44 UTC 2011

On 9 mei 2011, at 21:40, Tony Hain wrote:

>> Publicly held corporations are responsible to their shareholders to get
>> eyeballs on their content. *That* is their job, not promoting cool new
>> network tech. When you have millions of users hitting your site every
>> day losing 1/2000 is a large chunk of revenue.

Nonsense. 0.05% is well below the noise margin for anything that involves humans.

>> The fact that the big
>> players are doing world IPv6 day at all should be celebrated, promoted,
>> and we should all be ready to take to heart the lessons learned from
>> it.

I applaud the first step, but I'm bothered by the fact that no second step is planned.

>> The content providers are not to be blamed for the giant mess that IPv6
>> deployment has become. If 6to4 and Teredo had never happened, in all
>> likelihood we wouldn't be in this situation today.

> The entire point of those technologies you are complaining about was to
> break the stalemate between content and network, because both sides will
> always wait and blame the other.

You're both somewhat right: there's nothing wrong with having 6to4 and Teredo available as an option for people who want/need easy IPv6, which is too hard to get otherwise for most people. The big mistake was to enable it by default. That ALWAYS ends badly. (See for instance HTTP pipelining, good idea but it got tainted by buggy implementations on the client side that made it impossible to enable on the server side.)

> The fact that the content side chose to
> wait until the last possible minute to start is where the approach falls
> down. Expecting magic to cover for lack of proactive effort 5-10 years ago
> is asking a bit much, even for the content mafia. 

The content people don't feel the address crunch and they have no incremental deployment: either you AAAA or you don't AAAA. The opposite is true for the eyeball people, so they are the ones that will have to get this ball rolling.

> In any case, the content side can mitigate all of the latency related issues
> they complain about in 6to4 by putting in a local 6to4 router and publishing
> the corresponding 2002:: prefix based address in DNS for their content.

That wouldn't help people behind firewalls that block protocol 41 (which is way too common) and it's harmful to those with non-6to4 connectivity but no (good) RFC 3484 support so they connect to those 2002:: addresses. (I'm looking at you, MacOS. Try for yourself here: http://6to4test3.runningipv6.net/ )

> We are about the witness the most expensive, complex, blame-fest of a
> transition that one could have imagined 10 years ago. This is simply due to
> the lack of up-front effort that both sides have demonstrated in getting to
> this point. Now that time has expired, all that is left to do is sit back
> and watch the fireworks.

I love fireworks.

I don't think it'll be all that bad, though. Pretty much all the pieces are in place now, it's mostly a question of simply enabling IPv6. Yes, people will whine but how else would we know the NANOG list is still working between operational issues?