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Ärende: FidoNews 28:07 [02/05]: General Articles
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                        GENERAL ARTICLES
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                        Fido and IPv6 Day
                        By Michiel van der Vlist 2:280/5555


Three weeks ago, I wrote that OS/2 and its successor EcomStation are
abondonware. Bob Bashe pointed out that there is a fairly recent
update for EcomStation, so it is not dead yet. I stand corrected.

I also wrote that the last five /8 blocks of IPv4 addresses would be
allocated by IANA in a couple of days. Well, it took a bit longer, it
actually happened on Wednesday, the 2nd of February, ten days later.
There was a ceremony in a conference centre in Miami, jointly
organised by the Number Resource Organisation (NRO), the Internet
Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the Internet
Society (ISOC) and the Internet Architecture Board (IAB). Speaches
were held and trophies and certificates representing the last five
blocks where handed over to representatives of the five regional
registries. The ceremony and the follow up press conference was
webcasted, so I saw them both.

So much for IPv4, the title of this article is Fido and IPv6 Day. The
next event relevant for the introduction of IPv6 is on June 8th and it
is called IPv6 day.

http://isoc.org/wp/worldipv6day/

On IPv6 day, many large content providers - the list is still growing
- will switch on IPv6 for their websites for one day. Many big players
already are IPv6 reacheable but not on the same url as their IPv4
website. To reach Youtube via IPv6 for example one has to go to
www6.youtube.com. Why the special url? Well, it appears that IPv6
isn't always working as well as it should. Normally when a DNS lookup
returns both an IPv6 and and IPv4 address, the application capable of
both, will connect via IPv6. The problem is that sometimes an
application "thinks" IPv6 is available but in reality it isn't. I
myself experienced this when I attempted to route an IPv6 subnet to my
LAN. The system set up as a router broadcasted router advertisements,
and so other systems on the LAN were assigned an IPv6 global unicast
address by autoconfiguration. They "thought" they had IPv6 access to
the net. But as the subnet was not routed, in reality they had not.
What happens then is that when surfing to a webs ite that is dual
stack, the browser attempts to connect via IPv6 and only when the
connection times out after a minute or so, it attempts IPv4. And not
just once, but for every subitem on the page as well. I can tell you,
this is extremely annoying. Now, I was knowingly and willingly
experimenting with IPv6 and it was due to an error in in own
configuration, so I won't blame Google, Youtube or E-Bay for it and
they will not lose me as customers over it.

But there are  "innocent" users who have IPv6 connectivity without
being aware of it and their IPv6 connectivity may be broken too. One
known problem is broken 6to4 gateways. 6to4 is an automatic tunneling
mechanism that is often enabled by default. It hunts for the nearest
6to4 gateway and sets up a tunnel that gives the user IPv6 access to
the net. But... it seems that it does not always work. The big boys
estimate that broken 6to4 affect 0.1% to 0.5% of their customers and
they say that is too much. So that is why they have separate url's for
their IPv6 access.

The idea behind IPv6 day is to expose the problem and do a wake-up
call, while equally spreading the pain. If people have a problem
reaching Google, they will shift to Yahoo. And have the same problem
there. When they then go to twitter or facebook, to discuss the
problem they will have the problem there too.

IPv4 only users will not be affected. Neither will dual stack users
who's IPv6 connectivity has been thoroughly tested, It is the "silent
adopters", the ones who - knowingly or unknowingly - installed IPv6 in
the past and who forgot about it, who may encounter problems.

What can the FidoNet community do? My first reaction would be: Join
and switch on IPv6 for your systems. But we do not have an IPv6
capable mailer yet and we, as a community, do not really need a
special day to test our IPv6 connectivity, as testing stuff is what we
do all the time. What we can do is not for ourselves, but for our
friends and neighbours. On Wednesday June 8th, some of them may come
to you asking for help, because "their InterNet is doing funny". So
what you can do is delve into the matter now. Experiment with IPv6,
install it on your system, go through the learning curve. So that when
on the 8th of June someone asks for your help, you can help them fix
the problem.



References:

1) Geoff Huston. Flailing IPv6.
http://www.potaroo.net/ispcol/2010-12/6to4fail.html

2) Miriam Kuenhe, The trouble with 6to4
http://www.circleid.com/posts/20101206_the_trouble_with_6to4/

3) Emile Aben, 6to4 How bad is it reallly?
http://labs.ripe.net/Members/emileaben/6to4-how-bad-is-it-really

4) Tore Andersson, IPv6 dual-stack client loss in Norway
http://www.fud.no/ipv6/



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