IPv6 Operational Experience at CRC NANOG 19 June 10-13, 2000 William F. Maton

What is CRC?  Communications Research Center  Agency of Federal Ministry of Industry  Clients:  National Defence  Canadian Space Agency  Industries and other research entities  Telecos  Wireless Communications Industry  Governments

CRC GigaPoP  Comprised of a group of routers now  Cat 5500+RSM+ATM, 2xCisco 4500M’s  Serving:  CRC  National Defence Research  OCRI  National Capitol Institute of Telecommunications  Canadian Space Agency  Several Schools (K12)

Getting going  First connection to the 6bone in September, 1998  Cisco 4500 router with 11.3+IPv6  Native IPv6 connection running over ATM PVC provided under the CA*Net 2 program  pTLA allocation out of 6bone test space

Recent connectivity news  CA*Net 3 is a POS network, no ATM  Just switched to tunnels, just like Abilene  No support in GSR core for IPv6  Tunnel to Qwest for multihomed host testing  2Mb/s ATM link to Germany, just for IPv6  Transit may one day be available  Just got ARIN-assigned IPv6 prefix  Cut-over from 6bone space was very simple

GigaPOP CA*net 3 National Optical Internet Vancouver Calgary Regina Winnipeg Ottawa Montreal Toronto Halifax St. John’s Fredericton Charlottetown RAN BCnet WURCnet SRnet MRnet ONet RISQ ACORN OC3 DS3 OC12 OC48 Chicago STAR TAP CA*net 3 OC12 Seattle New York Los Angeles

First IPv6 GigaPoP  In November of 1999, loaded an IPv6 image into our production GigaPoP router  Uptime of close to 90 days  It was fantastic!  Could run IPv6 to any network natively  Could even do MBGP, MSDP (not normally available then)  until…

bgp log-neighbor-changes  (Why use this command? ‘cuz it’s there)  NB: Otherwise, this code was surprisingly stable + =

A few things tried over time  IPv6 host deployments  Nothing left to chance, do configuration manually  at the time (1998) Linux had some issues at many different levels (kernel, libc, etc)  didn’t try FreeBSD  Combining IPv6 and IPv4 networks  The GigaPoP router test proved it possible  The IPv6 router participated in the CRC MPLS testbed (and continues production- wise)

IPv6 and the GSR  IPv6 testing with the GSR  Why? CA*Net 3 uses GSR’s  Testing was done to see if CA*Net 3 could support IPv6 natively  Current test image doesn’t work with several key interfaces (like GE)  lack of real IGP for IPv6  Need to wait for core deployment  Have to wait for the vendor :-)

IPv6 Host Deployment  Goal: To see how difficult it is to deploy  Expectations:  It shouldn’t be so hard to implement if dual-stacks are available  end-users shouldn’t even know they’re using IPv6  In fact, they really couldn’t (and shouldn’t) care less.

Being boring  KAME, Solaris 8, linux make it really boring  Done right, you won’t notice the IPv6 stack is there  As far as networking was concerned, having IPv6 enabled on a host is a cinch  About those applications….

What we get already  Many networking apps for FresBSD/KAME  Do you Quake?  Most Solaris 8 networking apps are dualistic  IPv6 FTP is getting exercised  a few networking apps for Linux  its disorganization (The Bazaar) is its weakness right now  Debian is trying to assemble packages

It would be nice if...  Solaris 8 FTP daemon offered better logging  wu-ftpd really nice for this, but no plans for IPv6 yet  but there are six separate ports for linux alone, ergo  Linux got it together  Need to unify IPv6 FTP server with IPv4 FTP server and put a web server, all on the same box  More (game) applications appeared

Research Applications  Requirement to create a project that has:  Multicast  QoS Management  Builtin security  CRC DIVE project is the culmination  Virtual World using a combination of the above  IPv6 chosen because it meets the requirements

The future?  More trials on hosts  autoconfig address (DHCPv6)  neighbor discovery  In other words, gotta test how this works on the campus  Isn’t a mom-and-pop ISP like a campus after all?  Abuse the network  See what breaks around the IPv6 router  Really start pushing per packet limit  Sane IPv6 addressing scheme  IPv6 for the masses

Thanks  Info about CRC:   CRC GigaPoP and IPv6 info:  (under perpetual construction)  IPv6 hosts to try:  (for the mail-insane)  ftp://ftp.crc.ca/ is available at ftp://bear.dgim.crc.ca/ via IPv6  You’re very welcome to mirror “the bear” anytime - via IPv6 :-)  Web server address TBA on  Info about the CA*Net 3 IPv6 project 