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

On Mon, Oct 7, 2019 at 9:16 AM Job Snijders <job at instituut.net> wrote:
>
> Dear Dave,
>
> On Mon, Oct 7, 2019 at 4:04 PM Dave Taht <dave.taht at gmail.com> wrote:
> > If I can get *one* person in this working group to go down to their
> > local coffee shop and make ipv6 work by whatever means necessary (and
> > also fix their bufferbloat) - I'll consider my participation in this
> > thread a success.
>
> That may be how you measure success yourself, however I measure
> differently: I consider your input in this thread insightful and
> valuable, regardless of the coffee shop's connectivity.

:blush: I have some feedback on a couple other things that have gone
by on these threads that I guess you just encouraged me to write.

You might regret encouraging me, but here's something that just poured out.

> Influencing the connectivity of any public place (bar, coffee shop, or
> mall) who don't consider their internet access service their core
> business, can be really tricky. Any anecdotal data gleaned from that
> experience is just that, anecdotal.

Every journey begins with a single step.

*enough* anecdotal experience (and a unified set of questions to ask)
gathered this way turns into scientific evidence and a plan for making
things better along this portion of the edge. It's less complicated to turn
your local coffee shop owner on than it is to convince an enterprise.

(besides, it's fun - I work 2 days a week out of coffee shops - and in my (our!)
best interest to make the coffee shop's internet work as good as possible.
For all I know the gig will turn into money - if only my patreon was about 10x
higher (https://www.patreon.com/dtaht) I could stop working on "pets.com"
 stuff to stay alive - and try to work on more difficult issues more regularly)

So like I said, it would be great if more folk fixed their local
coffee shop and got first
hand experience at low scale with the real issues remaining with ipv6
deployment.

I've worked on a few "newer" ipv6 related technologies that might help
speed deployment.
as well as observed a few things about networks along the edge. Since
I'm new around
here, for those that don't know - I used to live in Nicaragua, where I
first volunteered for the OLPC project. I fell
in love with life down there, until my wifi failed in the rainy season
due to bufferbloat (if anyone
here wants more of that origin story for how cerowrt came to be, see:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wksh2DPHCDI ).

There was zero IPv6 deployed there along the edge when I was last
there (and given the political situation, it's unlikely I'll go back
soon). There was no local place to tunnel, either. The fiber along the
highway between nicaragua and coasta rica had been cut years prior and
nobody was moving to replace it. Still, from 2006- 2011 we went from
adhoc
wifi links going over the mountain to a cable and fiber deployment
that sort of worked. The fiber deployment was
*weird* single channel stuff, and the cable deployment typically was
5Mbit/1mbit when I was last there (2016). The ISPs
cheaped out greatly on all the gear, all the gear was not rated for
high temp and humidity and failed a lot, and I have
pictures of what your typical electrical and network cabling look like
down there that will make you shudder....

Anyway...

Multiple small coffee shops and hotels down in SJDS have the most
debloated internet possible - 'cause I talked
folk into turning stuff on (between surfing excursions and boat
drinks) they already had.
Over the years I used that distance to test in the real world codel's
(and BBR's) response to longer RTTs, and most recently sch_cake (
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1804.07617.pdf ) - (The other major place we
test long RTTs is on the island of mauritus)

Anyway, my mission #1 is to upgrade the middleboxes worldwide, to fix
bufferbloat. While we're doing that it would pay to try and deploy
newer stuff like ipv6, DNSSEC, mo' ipv4, observe what users outside
the english speaking community are doing, and so on. Here's some
traceroutes, please let me talk to them:

http://blog.cerowrt.org/post/nicaragua/

All the classic ipv6 over ipv4 tunnelling technologies failed. I was
able to get stuff over udp4 to be fairly reliable, but
not to any standard anyone here is used to. Power often flickers 6+
times a day, and hitting reload on websites massively common - try to
nail up a tcp or ssh connection and good luck for more than a few
hours. This was
kind of the advantage to trying to do ipv6 tunnels as my ssh
connections would survive a blink. But who
cares about ssh in a web world?

Now, based on some of those experiences - I tended to regard reliable
power distribution as a key starting point. Education - in spanish -
the next one. How much ipv6 training is there in spanish?

Getting ipv4 to work at all is a high demand item due to the tourist
trade, and things like skype and whatsapp are the big tourist
applications, whatsapp and yourube (due to the literacy problem) the
big apps for locals.

Cell rolled out *amazinging* in 2011-2016. Everybody - in a country of
1000GDP per head - managed to get a phone with internet on it and used
the first applications they were handed. (email is *dead*). I have a
funny photo of
the local milkman with an ox-drawn cart, tapping away on his phone...

Anyway....

I've worked on means to make routing native ipv6 over unnumbered
interfaces far, far easier with the babel protocol, and worked on
securing it and the RFCs for that are final. The *code* doesn't scale
well but at least it works over wireless
links better than anything else I know.

I tend to regard the ipv6 prefix distribution problem over such a mess
of RFC1918 as the biggest problem we have in networks such this. Even
with tunnels it's very problematic, even static. DHCPv6-pd over
relays? don't make me laugh.
like this

(In fact, I'd really like to be able somehow get more ipv4 prefixes
out to the edge on such networks also. It doesn't
make any sense to backhaul everything up to managua over tin cans and
string if it were possible to bring up a whole town)

Anyway, total aside...

>
> Kind regards,
>
> Job



-- 

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