[ppml] IPv6 getting real: was Policy Proposal: IPv4 TransferPolicy Proposal

[k claffy]

On Fri, Feb 15, 2008 at 10:16:59PM -0800, Kevin Oberman wrote:
  
  Unlike the commercial world, the research and educational networks of
  the world mostly provide full IPv6 capability. Some of us have been
  providing production IPv6 for over half a decade.

kevin, this definition of "full" is as fuzzy as the vendors'.
it took us (an network research group at SDSC/UCSD) 2 years to 
get IPv6 connectivity to our prefix after we first requested it.  
we hit 6 or 7 obstacles, including address space suballocation
bureaucracy (weeks back and forth getting clarification on
what kind of ipv6 addresses we should have, then months with ucsd
trying to get a suballocation) to cisco router working ipv6
image acquisition (months, several re-tries) to sysadmin
learning curves ("ugh, what do we do about autoconf") 
to fires in san diego burning down the house of the only SDSC
network admin who had the magic combination of enable access
and ipv6 clue on the magic router between us and v6 transit
to Internet2 (months.).  all along we had the issue of what
research grant should pay for the additional work, since NSF 
certainly isn't interested in funding infrastructure, and we 
had to take time away from funded research projects to work on it.  
my hopes for having the academics blaze the ipv6 trail 
were tempered by the reality of trying it ourselves.

  The fact that IPv6 is available to most users at many major universities
  in the US, Canada, and Europe should mean a fair amount of traffic. 

there may be some optimistic confluence of 'universities' 
and 'users' here.  we have ipv6 to our prefix now, but we had 
strong incentive because we want to do ipv6 topology mapping.
i can't imagine why academics in general 'should' use ipv6.
academics in general have no idea what ipv6 is, nor reason to learn. 

  After all, it's in the core. You would think college students
  would be trading MP3s or movies or something. (I've heard many rumors
  that they have been known to do so over IPv4.)

you lost me there. if they're trading music and movies
over ipv4, why should they use ipv6?  

  Is there traffic? Not that I have seen. Is there demand? Not that I have
  seen. Is there interest? At least a bit more than I typically see in
  the commercial Internet, but not a whole lot.

well, i'm not sure how you'd see it since the Juniper routers
that form the core of Internet2's backbone, while v6-capable, 
are not v6-netflow-capable.  the flow export on those boxes 
doesn't support v6, and there has been no other attempt to 
characterize IPv6 traffic (tunneled or native) on I2. 
(see slide 14 of joe's talk http://www.uoregon.edu/~joe/missing-half/ )

so in 2008 not only is there no evidence that U.S. academics are 
using IPv6 applications on their backbone, there is also currently 
no means to acquire evidence.   no trailblazing here.  and if
I2 only had enough resources for tilting at one windmill this 
decade: DNSSEC or IPv6, which should they pursue?

  Every major router vendor offers "full" IPv6 support. It's just that the
  definition of "full" is a bit fuzzy. It often is synonymous with
  "half-baked".

i'm still missing the leap of logic that connects 'half-baked' 
to the expectation that academic networking staff on perpetually 
tight budgets and already loaded down with more critical networking 
issues than they can handle should be investing in IPv6.
i'm not saying they shouldn't, but noone has made the case.

the R&E community will need exactly the same two things that the 
rest of the world will need to support ipv6:  incentive and capital.

k