Sprint IPv6

[Alexander Gall]

On Thu, 2 Oct 2008 10:39:27 +0200, Gert Doering <gert at space.net> said:

> Hi,
> On Thu, Oct 02, 2008 at 10:33:09AM +0200, Pierfrancesco Caci wrote:
>> >> have you seen issues with providers/peers that use 6PE?
>> > Oh yes.  Especially with this one.
>> 
>> without entering in a "let's blame my provider" contest, can you tell
>> us what kind of problems did you see? I'm interested because we also
>> use 6PE and, besides that time I disabled mpls on a link trying to
>> solve a different problem, I have not received any feedback (positive
>> or negative) from my customers. Usually, that means things just work,
>> but you can never tell

> As a customer, we really really dislike seeing 6PE used in our upstreams'
> networks because it means that traceroute6 is becoming useless - you can
> see that "there is a problem somewhere in the upstream network", but 
> you have no chance of pinpointing things like packet loss or (worse)
> black holes to the routers/links where it's happening.

> In this specific case, there were some problems with RSVP reservations
> that led to MPLS tunnels going down completely in case of link outages,
> which the control plane didn't notice - so BGP claimed "everything is
> fine" while the data packets disappeared into a big black hole.

I'd like to chime in here, because my frustration level with the 6PE
implementation of GBLX has just increased by another notch these days.
We've been using them as IPv6 upstream for a couple of years and had
numerous issues with routing blackholes, which they are just unable to
fix permanently (or they just don't care enough).  They never notice
these issues themselves, then "bounce a tunnel" (as they call it) to
fix it or simply drag it on long enough without doing anything until
the problem disappears by itself.  Sigh.

We never had any problems with other upstreams that have simple IPv6
overlays.  Help me god when they start deploying "production" IPv6
using 6PE :-(

-- 
Alex