Responses can be found in-line. Nathan Ward wrote:
Awesome, that saves me some effort.
Can you reveal what the profile of this particular ISP is?
Not really, for two reasons - 1) I don't want to say anything that would give away the ISP in question and 2) I don't really know. I referred to profile as more of a comparative thing - we'd need to do similar studies for other ISPs before we could say where a particular ISP might fall on the scale.
My main interest, is exploring the relationship between end users doing peer-to-peer on IPv4, and end users who have IPv6 (Teredo, 6to4). Do you have any numbers around that, or is it very hard to extract some?
I would say, looking out for IP protocol 41, and UDP port 3544 would do the trick.
So you just want to look at doing a similar study, except just looking at users who have demonstrated IPv6 capability? If so, I don't think I have that sort of data at hand, but it wouldn't be too hard to get it. The biggest difficulty is that it takes quite a while to process the packet traces (although I'm guessing you wouldn't need to look at the full four days worth of traffic).
Teredo of course uses non-standard ports for peer-to-peer, but that doesn't matter so much as it's always sending bubble packets to the server to keep NAT state open.
Your document talks about ports per session, do you have any data around ports per byte? I expect one would find that port 445 etc. drops down quite significantly in cases like that. What about session length, in seconds?
Again, I don't think I've been tracking these things specifically for incoming connections. I tracked a whole heap of stuff for outgoing flows, because that was what the Alcatel project was primarily focused on. But I could modify the code and re-run the processing to get that sort of stuff, if required.
I'm hoping to prove that with a bit of movement from a couple of application vendors (Skype, etc.) we can start doing SP-NAT and preserve end-to-end, but over IPv6 instead of IPv4.
Azureus is already doing IPv6 over IPv6, uTorrent has it coming in 1.8.
Ideally, I'd like to get some numbers around this IPv4 p2p / IPv6 p2p relationship regularly updated, as I suspect as more and more applications become IPv6 aware the numbers will change quite significantly.
Being able to do this sort of thing on a regular basis would be pretty neat. The set of traces we've been using for this are starting to get a little out-of-date now (February 2007). It's mainly a matter of getting a box in an appropriate location within an ISP to get some decent up-to-date traces.
Next big thing to watch out for is uTorrent 1.8 - by default it turns on IPv6(Teredo,6to4,etc.) in Windows when it is installed. Azureus only uses IPv6 if it's enabled already.
-- Nathan Ward
Ultimately, we can probably give sort out some numbers for you if you don't mind waiting for the data to be processed. If you're keen, let me know and we can start working out the exact specifics of what you want measured. Shane Alcock WAND Network Research Group University of Waikato