IPv6 foot-dragging

George Bonser gbonser at seven.com
Wed May 11 17:01:20 UTC 2011


> 
> Apparently the need for IPv6 isn't yet high enough to consider adding
a
> transit provider. I've seen enough press releases from NTT and HE to
> know there's at least two that can do this out there.
> 

I believe the major holdup at this point is lack of v6 eyeballs.  End
user CPE, particularly DSL CPE, has been lagging in v6 capability.

As for v6 upstreams, I have native v6 with both InterNAP (may not be
available at ALL POPs yet) and HE. Savvis has yet to deploy it in the US
at the POP pertinent to our operatons.

The big push for v6 eyeballs at the current time are the mobile
operators.  We are seeing activity that would indicate there are mobile
devices out there that are native v6 at this time.  Content providers
who have a lot of mobile clients might find they have more native v6
eyeballs than they think they have.

A couple of things you can do to check.  First of all look for requests
to your DNS servers for AAAA records and note where those are coming
from.  That doesn't prove a lot but it gives some indication of who
might have v6 someplace in their network. If you are seeing a
significant number of these, the next thing I would do is get a dns
server on your network working with v6 and get that IP address in whois
even if all you are serving is v4 A records.  Then note who is arriving
over v6 asking for AAAA records.  Those are the best candidates for
enabling v6 services.  Note which services those are asking for, pick
one, and if you have gear capable of it (say, for example, a load
balancer), configure a v6 VIP for that service balancing to v4 servers
behind it.  Place the AAAA record for this service in the zone handed
out via v6 AAAA requests (ONLY!) and watch the service VIP and see if
clients are connecting.

So at this point you are handing out AAAA records for a v6 service but
ONLY for DNS requests that arrive via IPv6 asking for it.  Any requests
arriving via v4 asking for an AAAA record would get the NOERROR response
and an A record for the resource (client might have IPv6 internally but
doesn't have v6 all the way to the Internet or their Internet coverage
might be "spotty" and doesn't include you coughCogentcough).







More information about the NANOG mailing list