IPv6 woes - RFC

Sat Sep 18 20:28:02 UTC 2021

On Fri, 17 Sep 2021 21:15:00 -0700
Owen DeLong via NANOG <nanog at nanog.org> wrote:

> Unless their infrastructure runs significantly on hardware and
> software pre-2004 (unlikely), so does the cost of adding IPv6 to
> their content servers. Especially if they’re using a CDN such as
> Akamai.

	Owen, I have nothing but respect for you, but this is a
fantasy...  I provide FTTx services to business and residential.  I had
to fight, and grind, and test for over a year to get a mix of hardware
and software that would provide anything resembling IPv6 equivalent
services to most of our customers.  The only devices in my network that
worked with few problems are my Adtran gpon/xgs-pon cards (try to find
DHCPv6 option-18 support on anything else)... EVERYTHING else I used
from my Juniper routers to customer CPE had to go through more rounds
of testing and bug fixes than I could name - for years.

	I've provided static v6 services to business customers for a
long time (with no takers), but dynamic, scalable residential services
was very hard.  There are still holes in our infrastructure because most
vendors I am dealing with are doing very little to no v6 testing and
still think I am a weirdo for asking for it.  Every ACS vendor is
either just now working on it, or thinks they have it until I point out
to them that they don't.  There have been some vendors that were good
to work with: Juniper fixed the bugs I reported once I was able to
prove to them it really was on there end (DHCPv6 relay server).  ZyXel
has been good to work with; they care about and fix bugs that are
reported.

	There are also big vendors I won't work with any more because
they do not have full v6 support for features I need, and they have no
plans to have it.  I'm not a big enough customer for them to care about
what I want.  I have devices with 2 year old software and zero v6
support and none is coming ever; these are not no-name vendors; they
are big.

	People who think modern equipment is ready to provide native
dual-stack services at scale to their customers are either using stuff
very similar to mine, or are simply not doing it yet or have a lot of
compromises.

--TimH