V6 still not supported

Wed Mar 23 03:03:03 UTC 2022

I would normally not contribute to this, but I think having been a
passive participant of the IPng mail lists through the 80s-90s I like
the quality of reflecting "did we get what we wanted". I'm not writing
here as an RIR employee (which I am) but as somebody who was along for
the ride. We didn't get what we wanted. But, we did get what we built,
what we argued for, or accepted as an outcome, or chose to ignore. But
I don't think we got what we wanted. Tant pis. This is not uncommon

I was a partisan for TUBA personally. I just wanted the same with
bigger addresses. The decisions to re-architect outside of that, I
think in the end were not helpful to adoption. I am thinking about EH,
and their non transitive utility in routing, and fragmentation in
particular.  But I can celebrate that BGP for 6 works, and even can
work over BGP mediated purely by 4. I can celebrate that we now have
HUGE networks which are native 6 with a 4 overlay. Thats partly why I
find a huge personal disconnect with "failure" -It hasn't failed the
way DECnet failed. Far from it.

There is this other side: I'm dualstack, and I simply dont notice. I
am able to SSH back home from v6 externals, my home NAT is not a
blocker. I do not routinely consider if I am reaching endpoints on 4
or 6. At some level, it works. I look at some of the "wont work" mails
and I wonder what planet you are all on, because I am (and many other
are) convinced its working for me at scale. Probably? Its the change
from E2E to CDN mediated reality: the imbalance of dataflow is now
dominant, and IPv6 works fine for that world, because the transitive
costs don't apply. When most things come from a short hop path to a
CDN or IX, the pMTU problems probably don't emerge. the fragmentation
problems probably don't emerge. I might add that Mass CGN works too in
that world.

A lof of the vituperation here, is from people who either don't live
in a dualstack, or can't be in a dualstack because of
provider/upstream decisions. I am fortunate that I can ignore these
problems, but I don't "disbelieve" them. They just don't apply to me,
or to a huge number of other people, of the order 30-40% of the global
Internet. They don't apply to mass markets significantly larger than
the envisioned scale of Internet when we did this dance: Jio has more
customers than all of the Internet when IPng was being borne.

30% is failure? Well yes, but also no. It's sort of complicated. I'm
willing to bet that if your provider turned dualstack on underneath
you, few of you would realize.

Here's my (not serious) suggestion: lets flag day.

here's my other (not serious) suggestion: Lets hand back the V4, and
run everyone behind CGN with multiple /8 per ISP, keep all the global
unicast 4 for the centre.

Here's my final (serious) suggestion. We aren't going to be able to
reverse course out of the current situation. Maybe the best thing, is
to engineer it, not complain about it. Engineering won't end either
right now. Betting on 4 continuance is betting on markets over
planning. Maybe thats what some people want? What I want doesn't
matter that much btw.

-G