Re: [IPCop-user] ipv6 support

[Robert K. <Lit...@xs...>]

On Mon, 2007-11-26 at 13:33 -0800, Jim Jowski wrote:
> ti...@cl... wrote:

> > >From my reading people will be starting to move to ipv6 in a fairly
> > major way as early as 2009/10. That doesn't leave very long to get it
> > implemented.

> No argument here.

Alright, I'll bite. I find it very unlikely that anyone will be moving
to IPv6 (ie switching off IPv4) at any time in the next 5 years at the
very least. It's certainly possible that more people might begin
deploying IPv6 *alongside* IPv4 in the next couple of years, but it's
something that's been looking possible for a long time and so far nobody
has been in much of a rush.

The big issue here is a chicken and egg one. The ISPs feel no need to
deploy IPv6 because there is very little content available over v6 and
that which is available over v6 is available over v4 anyway. That means
no customers are asking for v6, and deploying and supporting it would be
wasted resources.

Meanwhile the content providers see no reason to deploy IPv6 because not
only are there very very few customers that have v6 access, but there
are also a whole load of people who have v6 misconfigured. The
unfortunate reality of vista being pushed out with v6 enabled by default
is that there are now a lot of PCs that have v6 installed and enabled,
but are connected via a network that doesn't support v6. In theory vista
should use tunnels to connect at this point, but in practise this isn't
always possible, particularly when firewalls are involved. What that
means is that some of the content providers who did support v6 have been
forced to disable it as a big chunk of their customers were no longer
able to access their sites. I saw one provider claim they lost 10% of
traffic by enabling v6.

Even when both client and server are properly configured for IPv6 there
are still some rather unfortunate issues with IPv6 as it's currently
deployed. The big one being that until IPv6 gets wider deployment there
just aren't as many v6 enabled interconnects out there. That means
you'll often find your traffic going odd places, it's not entirely
uncommon for someone on the east coast of the US trying to connect to
somewhere on the west finding their traffic going out via Japan and back
in. That makes both ISPs and content providers reluctant to deploy,
because as soon as they switch it on they suddenly get complaints things
aren't as fast as they were.

The good news? from a technical point of view IPv6 isn't really that
difficult, linux IPv6 support is pretty good, including firewalling and
routing. There's really no reason we can't implement the basics in IPCop
in a month or two should it become necessary, but at the minute it just
doesn't seem worthwhile. Of course if any of you disagree and would like
to see IPv6 sooner then we'd welcome your help developing the necessary
patches over on the devel list...

-- 
 Robert Kerr