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

On 10/5/19 11:53 AM, Dave Taht wrote:
> Lee Howard <lee at asgard.org> writes:
>
>> On 10/4/19 4:55 PM, Dave Taht wrote:
>>> 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...
>> I can think of several programmatic ways to deal with that.
> ...
>
> for real use a static ipv6/48 to distribute is needed. Dynamic ipv6
> assignments are fine if you are doing trivial stuff but if ipv6 is ever
> to even start to supplant ipv4 it's got to become more static.

Or more resilient to renumbering. I didn't mean to suggest that you as a 
user should have to code your home network. I meant that we (maybe IETF) 
have not done well at handling the case of "I received a new prefix, and 
I am the edge router; I need to tell everything else what changed." Thus 
kicking off RAs, DHCPv6 updates, dDNS updates, and a firewall that 
understands dynamic prefixing.


>> I was thinking about some Hackathon projects to add IPv6 capability to
>> open source projects. Seems to me the hardest part is making sure
>> there's an adequate test environment.
> Hackathons ARE useful tools for getting a short burst of focused work
> out of people sharing the same space and time, but too many are thinking
> hackathons alone will solve more detailed design, coding and iteration
> problems; it's one of those ideas trivializing the costs of "Real
> Programming(tm)" that really bugs me nowadays.
>
> I could share here the detailed project management stuff that went into
> cerowrt's run (3 years), or the outline of work we did for
> make-wifi-fast - which we've now been at for over 5 years now - 3+ to
> get fq_codel to work right on wifi, 2 to rework the API to work for more
> devices, and a pointer to the latest work which has been going for 3+
> months now - and for all that we've only accomplished about 1/10th what
> we wanted to do, and only on 4 chipsets (most recently intel's ax200
> chips) out of the hundreds.

This might make for an interesting WG discussion, getting actual work 
organized and done.


>>>>> 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%.
>> (Replying to an item upthread)
>>
>> APNIC's statistics show that in almost every network that has IPv6, it
>> is almost always used.
> I pointed to coffee shops as one counter example.
If they don't have IPv6, they're not using it.
>   To the lack of
> DHCPv6-PD on android (and I think, IOS) for tethering as another.

Based on discussions at IETF, I guess Android is expecting to get 
multiple IPv6 addresses and reassign as needed. Don't know about IOS.


>> Another thought I've had:
>>
>> One of the reasons small ISPs can't deploy IPv6 is that they don't
>> control the features in the CPE, because they don't buy enough.
>>
>> I know a couple CPE vendors who would be happy to provide a specific
>> feature set for a guaranteed purchase of a couple thousand units a
>> month. This sounds like a good business to me: if a bunch of small
>> ISPs each contract for a specific number of units, but require
>> RIPE-554, RFC7084, and RFC8085, we could both get the needed features,
>> and get a larger volume discount than they get now.
> Yes, the smaller ISPs should join together in a buying
> club like that. Tried to get that going in NZ once. Failed.
>
> tried harder to make the aftermarket do the right thing - the eeros and
> google wifi's of the world are doing ok, the bottom part of the market
> just copy/pastes whatever's in openwrt at that moment, slaps a label
> on it and ships it. So we focused on making the openwrt base as good
> as possible.
Might be another part of "What the WG should do" discussion.
>> Saving $1 per CPE is better than spending $20 for an IPv4 address for
>> every new user. Please confirm my math. :)
> I always thought that ISPs would invest in their CPE far more than they
> have. Free.fr being a shining example! ISPs get paid for modem rentals
> and have customer support costs that could be reduced - that should have
> been a great ongoing funding source and motivation, alone.
>
> but I know a few vendors, like evenroute, doing bufferbloat AND ipv6
> right, that have totally failed to crack ISP market thus far.
>
> and for no reason I can think of, the rental folk don't push out
> new hardware OR new software to their users - I think charter made
> an effort to get docsis 3.1 stuff out there and retire all the docsis
> 2.0 gear in place, but not comcast.
>
> Secondly none of those ipv6 standards help when you still really need a
> real IPv4 address, so yer still out the $20, IF you can buy the /24s you
> need. And there's more ipv6 RFCs left without running, integrated code,
> to support them.

In my experience, accountants run the CPE purchasing, and saving 5¢ per 
unit is worth more to them than avoiding 10% of them driving $30 support 
calls. Same with rentals: why replace when the cost is already 
completely written off? There are some good reasons (like technical debt 
dragging on forward competitiveness) to replace.

It may be the case that not everyone needs a unique IPv4 address. 
Several broadband ISPs have deployed DS-Lite, for example. I don't know 
the business model; do they charge for unique IPv4 addresses when 
needed? That's sort of back to my other point of aligning expenses and 
revenues.


>> You just mentioned your un-upgradable "OS/2 Warp, MS-DOS, Windows 95,
>> HPUX, Solaris, Windows 2000," and now you say it's easy to upgrade.
> I didn't say it was "easy to upgrade" in the context of this legacy
> gear, I said it was easy to "add" 420m addresses. 240/4 is almost fully
> enabled in every OS except windows, for example. Fixed the last bug
> in it for linux and openwrt last december. Deploying. 0/8 now.
What's the relative level of support for unicast 240/4 and IPv6?
>
> Yea, people keep missing on this point. IPv6 is not globally reachable
> either. To try and clarify: A new IOT device trying to backhaul its
> data to 240.0.0.1 doesn't need to have a windows OS also trying to get to
> that same address. Is that clearer? A new application can try to use
> new IPv4 addresses.

Do you mean 240/4 for private connectivity, or 240/4 publicly routed and 
it's fine for some applications if it's unreachable? Do all routers etc 
support it?

Lee