On 26 Feb 2005, at 05:50, Perry Lorier wrote:
Joe Abley wrote:
On 25 Feb 2005, at 20:39, Philip D'Ath wrote:
I'm talking about using NAT-PT to allow a native ipv6 network to talk to an ipv4 network. Without some kind of protocol translation (aka PT) ipv6 can't talk to ipv4. The reason this has to be done is because you can't buy an ipv6 connection to an ISP in NZ yet.
In the absense of local carriers with dual-stack edge routers (i.e. in the case of most of the planet) the way you do this is terminate a tunnel somewhere.
I humbly disagree. My experience with public end user tunnel brokers is that none of them are "close" enough to NZ. No matter who you broker with you end up paying in huge (>3000ms in some cases!) RTT's, this is especially true of the large US tunnel brokers such as hurricane electric and freenet. A much more reliable way (IMHO) to play with IPv6 in New Zealand is to use 6to4.
There's a slight contradiction in your sentiments above -- 6to4 is a mechanism for tunnelling without manually specifying tunnel endpoints, not some kind of address translation mechanism, and so "6to4 is more reliable than tunnelling" doesn't seem to make a tremendous amount of sense. If you're using the rfc3068 6to4 relay router, 192.88.99.1, then your tunnel endpoint is probably outside NZ -- but unpredictably further away than a fixed tunnel broker, since 192.88.99.0/24 is anycast and you can never be completely sure which relay router you're going to reach at any particular time. From a router attached to ICONZ's network, 192.88.99.1 is in Poland, so your encapsulated packets are crossing two oceans. From a router attached to TCL's network, 192.88.99.1 is in Boston. Neither of these are obviously better choices than the usual suspects on the west coast of the US, or AARNet in Australia. [Having said that, I have heard that some of the prominent tunnel brokers have had scaling issues with their services, and it's possible some of the large RTTs you've seen have been due to lab 7200s running at 100% CPU, or under-sized circuits to tunnel routers running at capacity.] Running a 6to4 relay router in your network is a nice service to provide to your customers, incidentally, if you're an ISP; it'd be a nice way for the international carriers to atone for some of their de-peering antics, for example (hint hint) :-) I'm very happy to plumb tunnels to ISC's Junipers in California, if that satisfies a need. Since we do not provision them automatically, however, I'd far rather set a few tunnels up to ISPs (which could then run tunnels to their customers, Citylink tunnel brokers, etc) than many tunnels to individual nznog geeks' home networks. Joe