IPv6 Ignorance

[Tim Densmore]

Hi Gert,

On 10/5/2012 12:15 PM, Gert Doering wrote:
> That's the problem: IPv6 is not a "product".  It's plumbing.
Sorry, that was clumsy wording on my part.  Though it *is* an expense if 
the customer is going to need to replace their NAT router with one that 
can do v6 to take advantage the v6 internet.  And in some ways it is a 
"product." Out of our 2 upstreams, one was able to quickly setup MP-BGP 
with us, while the other said they could but so far haven't, and aren't 
returning email currently.  If it turns out that our second upstream 
can't provide dual stack BGP we'd have to "vote with our wallets" to get 
dual-homed IPv6 connectivity.  I can't see that happening, but hopefully 
you get what I'm saying.

> People do not ask for "IPv4" either, they want "Internet".

Completely agree.

>
> Now, the problem here is - using IPv4-only, "Internet" is going to be
> expensive and increasingly fragile and non-working in the not-so-far
> future (multiple layers of NATs, half of those overloaded at peak
> times, etc.) - so to be able to sell the product "Internet", we all
> need to move to new plumbing.  IPv6.
I suppose I'm lucky.  So far I haven't had to NAT a single customer 
connection.  This may be why I'm personally not seeing a huge demand.

> Don't *ask*, just *ship* - make it part of the standard package, and
> just deliver it.  (I'm not claiming we're fully there yet, but for example
> all our mail products [finally] have IPv6 capable MXes now...)
For content, I agree completely (and hope that happy eyeballs or 
whatever does a good job).  I'm working towards that, but in many cases 
progress is either slow or hits road blocks.  Getting back to cost, we 
have a large amount of equipment that simply won't and will never do 
IPv6 that will have to be forklifted.  Still, I'm banging away, hoping 
that eventually everything in our environment is v6 capable.

I'm a little skittish about the idea of shipping IPv6 connectivity to 
customers who are unaware of it.  My understanding is that the current 
windows firewall speaks v4 and v6, but I haven't verified this.  
Certainly, I have seen linux boxes w/o ip6tables running happily grab a 
SLAAC address when they hear an RA.  I've made my share of mistakes that 
I still cringe when I recall them.  I really don't want to add "caused 
hundreds of customers to be pwn3d" to that list, though maybe I'm just 
being paranoid.

> If you count percentage of webservers, we have a long way to go, yes.
>
> If you count percentage of *traffic* that would use IPv6 if it's
> available at the client machine (and it's not a dumb Apple device),
> you'll see 20-40% due to google, youtube and facebook being v6-capable
> today.  That's a significant load reduction on your carrier-grade NAT
> box, and thus actually helps lower costs, while keeping the service
> up (no 3rd party NAT in the path).

Yes.  I imagine the savings could be considerable in some environments.  
I'd *love* to be able to present IPv6 as a solution for a problem rather 
than as a task in search of justification other than "well, someday 
we'll be glad we have it" or bragging rights. Or, maybe a better way for 
me to but that is, I'd love to be able to take advantage of this /32 I 
have kicking around rather than wondering how I'm going to be able to 
make use of it.

In any case, most of this is just sillytalk.  I'm in favor of IPv6, and 
am trying to get it deployed and delivered.  I don't currently know how 
we'll get it delivered to residential customers or make a buck off of 
it, but hopefully at some point this effort will pay off.  Folks like 
the ones in the UBNT forums thread originally referenced will not change 
until they have to.  IME, many of those businesses only offer IP 
connectivity and bandwidth - no email, DNS either shunted to their 
upstreams or via a 3rd party like godaddy, either don't have BGP to 
worry about or use PA space, etc.  Those folks are fortunate.  They can 
easily ignore IPv6 until it becomes an issue and then simply turn it on 
via a check box in their Tiks, Rockets and Nanos.  If I were in that 
situation, I imagine I might feel the same way - I'm obviously not much 
of a v6 evangelist as it is.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts,

TD