RE: An alternative to 6to4 and teredo

["Jeroen Massar" <jeroen@unfix.org>]

Pekka Savola wrote:

> On Thu, 16 Jan 2003, Erik Nordmark wrote:

<LONG SNIP>

> That's not all.  6to4/Teredo offer an automatic configuration using 
> anycast addresses.  Much easier than trying to figure out the closest 
> tunnel broker, configuring to use that etc.
>  
> > The upsides for tunnel broker (with UDP tunneling across 
> NATs, or even PPP
> > over  TCP over NATs for those so inclined) in addition to 
> the incentives above
> > is that it avoids the security issues around 6to4 and Teredo, and is
> > operationally much much simpler to trouble-shoot.
> 
> I agree, but there is a cost to a tunnel broker model, that 
> is, not so simple configuration..

There is at least Tunnel Setup Protocol (TSP*) which does automatic
configuration and it'salso quite extendable. On debian for instance
it's "apt-get install freenet6" and you are going. The only 'problem'
is that the Freenet6 broker system is located in the US thus european
hosts have some (80ms+) additional latency. A "POP" per ISP would be
better which is something we are pursuing for SixXS. The TSP protocol
can handle this fortunatly. A POP per ISP would at least mean that
clients can get near-native IPv6.

TSP: http://www.freenet6.net/draft-tsp.shtml
It is marked "Expires: November 30, 2001" though, what happened
that it didn't get pushed through?

Good example is xs4all who first had a IPng.nl based tunnelbroker
and modified it for their needs with which they are now providing
IPv6 to their clients who can't get it natively. The IPv6-in-IPv4
thus only is carried in their network untill their tunnelbox,
for xdsl clients this is thus max 3 hops and a latency of about
only <~3ms added when they would have native connectivity.
See the "Deployment at XS4all" presentation to be found at:
http://www.ams-ix.net/aiad/presentations.html for more info.

My point is that ISP's should be pushed to have something like
that or that at least they should deploy a 'close' relay, may
this be 6to4 or a tunnelbased system. As long as their clients
can connect as 'locally' as possible.

I've partially developped an alternative to this scheme with some
big differences to what Freenet6 does with their TSP protocol.
Some other things are in line first though. But it will be a
system I want to have deployed at least before march for the
SixXS system which we fortunatly abstracted with an API so that
things like these can be implemented quite easily.
Small example is port 42006 on our noc.sixxs.net box which
basically replaces the website and can be easily accessed by
any program capable of sending data over a tcp/ip socket.

As I also probably wrote before, people do also sign up for
things like MSN and hotmail etc, so an IPv6 tunnel via a
webinterface shouldn't be that hard either.
The only thing is making them think that having it is useful!
(Which is one part I have on the 'other things to do first' :)

Greets,
 Jeroen