[AusNOG] SMH: "No room at the internet"

[Stuart Low]

Heya,

Inline replying.

>> Assuming the entire world doesn't just magically turn IPv6 so all
>> websites work via the native stack, I'd be interested to hear how people
>> in the ISP industry are dealing with situations where they've been
>> forced to NAT their IPv6 client addresses to an IPv4 website.
> 
> Why would anyone want to do that?

I didn't say anyone wanted to do it but to me it seems inevitable.

> What's more likely to happen is that residential users will be IPv4-NAT'ed,
> thereby freeing up enough addresses to enable hosting customers to be 
> dual-stack.

So you're saying that IPv4 customers would be shoved behind a smaller range of IPv4 dynamic NAT? Wouldn't that imply the same problem of accountability?

My concern isn't so much around 'our' hosting customers. If it comes down the line that all hosting customers have to run dual stack that's easy, you tell them, they do it or they face operations complaining about it. What I'm trying to figure out is what about all those hosting companies that DON'T force a dual stack on customers? Say what you want about the address space running out but I'd put $50 on a lot of smaller hosting co's (Australian and foreign) saving themselves support pain and not bothering with a 4 to 6 conversion on their existing deployments. Why? Cause it 'works' with the ISPs punting data 6to4 on their behalf.

> Then one's IPv6-capable residential customers get direct peer-to-peer 
> connectivity to the website, and one's IPv4-only customers see it through
> a NAT.
> The NATs are going to be really atrocious, by the way. The IPv4 Internet
> will carry increasingly massive quantities of suck.

I concur, it's going to be totally sucky but not withstanding the technical aspect of that suck what about the accountability aspect?

>From my perspective one way or another you're going to have some 6to4 tunnel/NAT in place. It might be a while until that happens (aka until everyones exhausted their options for freeing up more of their existing IPv4) but it will happen and at that point, how are people going to deal with the law enforcement part? If it's like any other nasty NAT'd setup I've seen (aka Satellite) maybe the solution is 'dont solve it' and when the cops come a knocking saying 'its a nat I can't help you'. They've tolerated it for Sat customers I presume because their numbers are tiny but I can't imagine they'd be overly happy if we turned around and said 'oh no, i cant tell you who was using that IP since that could be X in 1000, 10000 or 100000 dsl/cable/3G customers'.

Just my 2c and this comes with my previous disclaimer of I'm @sysadmin not @netadmin. :)

Stuart