joshua sahala wrote:
Sure they could play the 6-to-4 game, but that just highlights one problem with v6: there no effective migration path from v4 to v6... Besides, 6-to-4 looks a lot like NAT, and it is almost universally agreed that NAT is teh suck
Wait, what? I'm not sure that 6to4 is a lot like v4 NAT at all [cut]
Too true - this thread has me confusing the various 4 to 6 "migration" hacks I had a tunnel before moving to .nz but haven't bothered to migrate it (or get a new one) since the machine terminating it didn't survive the move
An effective migration path might be: 1) Get a v6 border+transit and/or a v6 capable Linux box+tunnels.
as has been pointed out in another email here, there is no v6 provider offering services in NZ...so the connections will have to be tunneled: this means additional hardware, transit, and colo costs (and decreased performance)
1.5) Don't forget to get to Citylink somehow.
There's native v6 there? With (native) connectivity to the rest of the world? (I don't think so)
2) Get your customers (who want them) v6 routers and configs.
You are making some very sweeping assumptions here: namely, that I am an intarwebs provider with customers. Perhaps I am a clueful content provider whose customers are someone else's end users (think YouTube or flickr) So fortunately, as a content provider, I don't have to come up with the money to provide lots of hardware to anyone except myself... unfortunately, I can't get IPv6 space since I have no end users...DOH!!!
3) Serve up a 6to4 relay to your customers, and have them configure their routers to use it.
see above regarding my "customers" presuming that I configure all of my content servers to use a 6-to-4 relay, local or remote doesn't really matter, performance is teh suck [tm] - the effective throughput of most tunnel servers/relays is a few-hundred Mbps (at best). This is wholly inadequate for a modern content network.
3.5) Consider doing static tunnels with your publicly allocated IPv6 space from [RIR].
still won't improve performance
4) When your access network can do v6, and you've got it all tested etc. turn it on, and if you didn't assign numbers in step 3.5, do so.
see #2
5) Profit (may not be applicable, but it always seems to come at the end of these type of lists)
well, so far I have spent a lot of money on extra hardware for mediocre performance from a lot of mostly hand-maintained tunnels... so no profit, just a lot of additional CAPEX and OPEX
You can do steps 1-3 in less than a day, even a few hours. It doesn't require any knowledge of v6 really, you just need some tunnels to send IPv6 traffic out over (other 6to4 routers will be used for the return path, of course, it'll look just like IPv4:41 traffic to you).
Whilst it is possible to set up a tunnel (or three), perhaps even over existing connectivity, 6-to-4 relays do not have the performance to support more than a moderate amount of traffic. So without native v6 services, I have little/no incentive to even try (ignoring the lack of multihoming). /joshua -- A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools. - Douglas Adams -