[ppml] unanswered questions

Sun May 7 09:30:23 EDT 2006

	all good arguments for setting aside resources for 
	learning about the impact of IPv6 now.... :)

(from the NZNOG list)

----- Forwarded message from Perry Lorier <perry at coders.net> -----

Date: Sun, 07 May 2006 23:16:36 +1200
From: Perry Lorier <perry at coders.net>

> "We will need this in 10 years, so we should start learning about it  
> now" is an argument, I guess, but most ISPs of my acquaintance are  
> more concerned with staying business for the next five years than  
> they are with optimising their costs in ten.

HTTP, IM and P2P all showed a doubling of bytes transfered over the
protocol every 2 weeks for at least 6 months.  In the case of HTTP and
P2P they became the dominant amount of traffic for some networks inside
that 6 months.

*If* IPv6 ever grows a killer app (big if...) an ISP may discover that
it's traffic is all inside IPv6 tunnels, and their traffic engineering
no longer works.  An Enterprise may discover they are unable to firewall
inside IPv6 traffic.  Everyone may discover that their traffic
monitoring software no longer reports useful results (Why is 60% of my
traffic protocol 41?).  "We'll just firewall all IPv6" just makes
everyone's Internet slow.  You might have less than 6 months to deal
with this.

IPv6 is dissimilar enough from v4 to require some retraining.  (What
happened to all the ARP messages?  Why don't I need DHCP?  Why *do* I
need DHCP?  Why are addresses that begin with Fe80: special? 2002:?
3ffe:?  What's the deal with RFC1918?  Is it normal my machine has
nearly 100 IPv6 addresses on a single interface?  Why doesn't doing the
obvious ping of a link local address work?  Why shouldn't I assign
...:feed:cafe:babe:f00d as an address to a machine?  Given a mac
address, what IPv6 address would be dynamically assigned to this host?
What's the story with DAD? and what's he doing on my network?  I have an
MTU of 576 on a link, what happened to my v6 traffic?  Would it be
better if it was 1000, 1100, 1200, 1300, 1400, 1500?  How am I going to
remember all these v6 addresses?  What's the v6 address for localhost?
What's the broadcast address on a v6 network? How do I enable v6 on the
various host types inside my network?  More importantly, quick, how do I
turn it off again?  If I have an IPv6 address on an interface, does that
mean I can talk to v6 hosts on the Internet?  Why does connecting to
some hosts on the internet now take a long time, it didn't yesterday!
What changed?  My network is v4 only and has a NAT box in front of it to
protect me from malicious traffic, how come all of these machines can
talk to v6 machines on the internet?  How come v6 machines on the
internet are successfully talking to them!  Whats the story with Site
locals? Where's all this multicast traffic come from?  What's the HD
ratio, and is it important to me? How do I multihome?  What's a home
agent good for and why does my machine want one?  Who's IKE and what's
he doing in my kernel?  What's the v6 equivilent tool for <x>?  How do
IPv6 only hosts talk to a IPv4 only host?  How do IPv4 only hosts talk
to IPv6 only hosts?  Someone once said IPv6 gave me {security, QoS,
addresses} for free, are they lying? misinformed? or is there some tiny
element of truth? What are the pitfalls with v6 addresses and DNS?  Do I
need to update my resolvers?  What's ULA, do I need it?  Should I give
dialup users a /20, /32, /48, /56, /64, /120, /127, or /128?  What about
DSL users?  What about colo'd users?  What about my fridge?  Given an
IPv6 address, can you derive it's MAC address?  What are the privacy
implications of this?  How are these addressed?  What's 6to4? ISATAP?
6over4? Teredo? SHIM6?  Are these acronyms going to haunt my nightmares?
 How do I do NAT in an IPv6 world?  What's AH and why is that going to
mean I can't screw with my users traffic anymore?  What's ESP and is
that going to make firewalling troublesome?  And what's the story with
QoS?  How on earth am I going to find 2**108 customers in two years to
keep APNIC happy?)

----- End forwarded message -----