Yahoo and IPv6

Sun May 15 19:48:38 UTC 2011

On 15 mei 2011, at 20:03, Jima wrote:

> BitTorrent tends to be an evolving protocol, with lots of clients  
> competing for mindshare; I'm not certain that limitation will remain.

Two years ago the Pirate Bay got on IPv6 in a way that was  
incompatible with existing clients that were IP version agnostic for  
lengthy reasons. (They decided you should have an IPv4 connection to  
the tracker (central server) to learn IPv4 peer addresses and an IPv6  
connection to learn IPv6 peer addresses.)

Then their legal troubles got serious and I'm guessing they find it  
hard enough to move their IPv4 address(es?) around so they're IPv4- 
only again. They also want to move away from having trackers at all,  
and instead use a peer-to-peer based system (DHT) to find peers.

Until about a year ago I regulary saw 6to4 addresses showing up  
through the DHT but that has stopped. And rarely, if ever, would it be  
possible to connect to those addresses, anyway. Not sure what changed,  
maybe my software is too old, I'm on the wrong DHT or whatever.

Interestingly, BitTorrent can easily be modified to use the IETF NAT  
traversal techniques (STUN/TURN/ICE) and these are also largely  
compatible with NAT64. (Because unlike exiting NAT, NAT64 came about  
through the IETF process rather than organically, it probably has the  
tightest specifications of any type of NAT.) So you could run  
BitTorrent behind a NAT64 and not even exhaust the NAT64's port  
numbers. But for that, the BitTorrent application developers need to  
do some work, which they probably won't be able to do successfully  
until they can test against a fully RFC-conforming NAT64 translator.