[ipv6-wg] Have we failed as IPv6 Working Group?

Michel Py <michel at arneill-py.sacramento.ca.us> writes:

> Hi Carlos,
>
>> Carlos Friaças wrote :
>> We have to acknowledge "IPv6 zealots" are real.
>> Disclaimer: i think i was part of that group some years ago.
>
> Indeed, and so was I. WAS.

As was I. Straws that broke my back finally were not being able to get a
static IPv6 address out of comcast, my hurricane tunnel getting blocked
by netflix, the still-huge prefix sub-distribution problem. The idea of
dynamic 2 week prefixes in part of the world prone to earthquakes
doesn't work for me... and my email over ipv6 is perpetually getting
blocked. spamhaus blocked multiple attempts to get dave at taht.net
(fully ipv6 enabled) to
send mail ti this list. And I sat on it for an hour after clearing it,
in the hope the block would clear. It didn't. Getting off email
blocklists isn't
a problem users can handle... and spamhaus has no means of interacting with me.

I *really* wanted email right to my servers in my office to just work, over
ipv6.

Everywhere I've been lately (nicaragua, portugal) has switched
to whatsapp.

Damn it, I wanted ipv6 to roll out faster than it has.

I'm in a half dozen RFCs, worked in IETF homenet, founded the cerowrt
project with an explicit goal of making ipv6 more deployable (as we
did!), *by actually implementing and distributing* more code based on
the standards, and I plan to keep working on making ipv6 better, but
that said, we need more running code, still, which only then can
get into a deployment, and nobody's funding that.

Nobody's implemented much of ietf homenet. there's no code to enable prefix
distribution on android. those are my top two ipv6 bullet items. more
universal SADR would help. Tunnels of all types "just working" would
be good too.

Perhaps with the chinese government mandating more ipv6, more open
source code, at least, will get funded and written. Maybe not of the
freedom and privacy enhancing stuff, though.

>
>
>> But Mr.Rey's reference about IPv6 deployment rates also makes a good point!
>
> Nobody cares about deployment rates. What good does it do, if people don't use it ?
> This is more realistic : https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html
> During the week, we are below 25%.

One entertaining thing I've been up to is checking the state of multiple
kinds of deployment in the coffee shops of the world with a string
of simple tests anyone can do (after we package them up better)

https://lists.bufferbloat.net/pipermail/bloat/2019-September/009334.html

So far thats:

 Bufferbloat: 95% (starbucks is doing the right thing here, yea!)
 IPv6: 0%
 DNSSEC: 0%.

"coffee shop testing"

offers y'all the opportunity to go "fix it" by leaping over the
counter, and/or to get a deeper grip on the real deployment problems we
have with middleboxes along the edge. Sometimes leads to free coffee,
too! Please have more meetings in coffee shops, not conventions!

Does anybody here, know what the heck the 5G people plan to do with
IPv6? and new places like starlink and oneweb and the like?

I really hope the 5G folk are going to get ipv6 prefix distribution and
SADR right, but have no data.

>
>> We also have to acknowledge "IPv4 zealots" are real.
>
> And they are the ones with the money. The lobbyists. The connections. The banana peels. The 75% market share.
> The IPv4 zealots have not always been there; they have been created as a reaction to the nonsense of the IPv6 zealots.
> IPv6 replacing IPv4 is a delusion.

I should make clear I'm not a zealot of any sort on the ipv4 vs ipv6
front. (I freely confess to being zealous about fq_codel... but if you
deployed it and looked at the data, I figure more would become one also! :))

I came to the reluctant conclusion last year that dual stack is going
to be ~forever,
that ipv6 was platauing in multiple ways and we needed to kick it harder, that
the rollout stats vs actual usage were hopelessly overoptimistic...
and went poking at what we
could do to ALSO make ipv4 better as a third way out and have been
plunking away it ever since. One thought was:

Since there was demand for more IPv4, perhaps that would also fuel
more updates to ipv6, as
both require middlebox updates...

As for money to make middleboxes better in *any* way, don't make me
laugh. During the cerowrt project we approached everybody making money
from the internet and multiple non-profits and got nowhere. I spent
my own fortune on it, and got a lot of volunteers onboard, especially
in the openwrt universe... and made things better, but I got nothing left.

We need a new kame-like project to jointly handle the cracks in the
ipv6 network architecture, standards and code, at the very least.

The costs of "mo ipv4" are trivial in comparison.

> 3 months ago, I turned DECNET off on my network. It was actually not
> even an IT/network decision; customer decided they were done with a
> product, and we de-commissioned the tools with DECNET. Business
> decision. We run OS/2 Warp, MS-DOS, Windows 95, HPUX, Solaris, Windows
> 2000, and I probably forget some.

Please note the ipv4 extensions stuff won't work with most that
"legacy" ipv4 stuff.
It can, however, enable new applications and services to exist. Most of
the IOT and SDN stacks already do work. Most don't have decent ipv6 support
due to resource constraints.

Perversely I kind of like the idea of a portion of the internet immune from
legacy windows worms and viruses....

>
> In 20 years, I will still need IPv4.

And it seems possible we can make more.

> And I have enough IPv4 on my hands for the foreseeable future. I bought some recently, just in case.
>
>
> I encourage the WG group to read this :
> https://www.internetgovernance.org/2019/02/20/report-on-ipv6-get-ready-for-a-mixed-internet-world/
> And the full text :
> https://www.internetgovernance.org/wp-content/uploads/IPv6-Migration-Study-final-report.pdf
> Serious work, paid by ICANN.

We cited that work in our presos on this subject as that was also key
on gilmore, paul wouters and myself to start looking hard at what it
would take to make ipv4 better in multiple ways. Please look it over!?

The ipv4 unicast extensions project is one outgrowth of that: A string
of trivial patches to a couple OSes and routing daemons and we're well
on our way to being able to add 420m new addresses to the internet,
within a 10 year time horizon.

Politically... oh, lawd. I'm focusing on technical feasibility only at the
moment. If you want some details about that, see the WIP here:

https://github.com/dtaht/unicast-extensions/tree/master/rfcs

I'd like lots more folk to review this before we punt it up to iana
and the ietf,
the RIRs and so on, and more to fiddle with 240/4 and 0/8, at least. Pay
special attention to section 7.1.

There's more than just this to make ipv4 better, possible. Taking
flack on just this much is no fun, but can we get more folk
thinking out of this box in general?

We certainly aren't proposing that ipv6 wg's *disband* but if more
folk would focus on making the code work and implementing more
of the standards that exist, AND looking at deployment problems
with an open mind and willingness to get in there and fix them,
that would be a goodness.



-- 

Dave Täht
CTO, TekLibre, LLC
http://www.teklibre.com
Tel: 1-831-205-9740