Production-scale NAT64

Thu Aug 27 05:11:49 UTC 2015

On 27/Aug/15 06:53, Tore Anderson wrote:

> Why wait until then?

I didn't say that we're waiting :-)...

>
> Any particular reason why you cannot already today provide IPv6
> addresses to your [new] customers in parallel with IPv4?

As a standard delivery of service, all our customers (BGP- and
non-BGP-based) are assigned IPv6 addresses by default. Point-to-point
for the BGP-based customers, and point-to-point + onward LAN assignments
for the non-BGP-based customers.

We do (and configure) this regardless of whether customers have asked
for it or not. In reality, 70% of the time it's like pulling teeth
getting customers to configure their end of the IPv6 point-to-point
address, much less turn-up an IPv6 BGP session. Reasons range from, "We
do not have a /32 IPv6 allocation yet", "Our router does not support
IPv6 yet", "We shall get to it in time, we are busy with other things
now", "It is not important to us", "We only have one interface in our
whole network with IPv6, so let's forget about it for now", "What is
IPv6? Oh, that - no thanks", and so on and so on.

30% of the time, however, we are dealing with a switched-on customer
that is happy to turn it up, and would even chase us for the same. We
like these types of customers.

You won't find a customer order or port in our network that does not
have IPv6 enabled. It's just all about getting their side sorted out.
And the team have been going out of their way to help them turn-up,
e.g., recommending the minimum software they should upgrade to to
support IPv6, helping them reach out to AFRINIC to apply for their /32
IPv6 allocation, helping them set things up on their end, nagging them
weekly on when they will get their side up, e.t.c. It's never-ending work.

Same things goes for peering - we always ask peers to turn-up both IPv4
and IPv6 at the same time. For the majority of peers, once the IPv4
session is up, they disappear. But we keep nagging, and nagging and
nagging, and many times we are successful in getting IPv6 going.
Sometimes, however, it's all falling on deaf ears. But it is good work,
so we do not let up.

All I was saying before is that when we can no longer hand out public
IPv4 addresses to new customers in the future, those customers will
require the NAT64 gateway to speak to IPv4-only resources. Hopefully, by
the time that happens, the demand on the NAT64 gateways is as close to
0% as possible.

Mark.