RE: An alternative to 6to4 and teredo

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

Pekka Savola [mailto:pekkas@netcore.fi] wrote:

> On Fri, 17 Jan 2003, Jeroen Massar wrote:
> > 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?
> 
> Folks probably lost hope.

I rather think it never got completely finished seeing that
Appendix A mentions "A DTD should be placed here for the protocol."
etc...
I added Marc to the CC list he can probably best comment on
what happened and/or what is going on.

> > 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' :)
> 
> Hotmail etc. have been around for ages.  Tunnel brokers come 
> and go.  The configuration may require some installation in your
computer. 
>  Sure, many folks still do it, but there's a big difference.
>
> But of course, some kind of "tunnel broker discovery" or 
> catalogues could be coined up too...

I had quite a big list of tunnelbrokers in the dmoz.org directory
but apparently some of the big mofo's there found that the IPv6
index wasn't good enough and changed it around. Fortunatly google
mirrors it to their directory.google.com* and thus it still exists,
it isn't on dmoz any more so it's unmaintained unfortunatly.

* =
http://directory.google.com/Top/Computers/Internet/Protocols/IP/IPng/IPv
6_Access_Providers/?il=1

Checking the top 10 I see some very stable TB's. And I think that
the google ranking also is quite a good indication of the use of
the TB's. HE + Freenet6 are quite large, though I never heared
of any numbers from them. For SixXS/IPng (IPng is using the SixXS code)
the listing is at http://www.sixxs.net/misc/statistics/ , this is
Pim and my project so I won't go bragging around with it I do have
to say that all the tunnels noted there (500+) are actively used.
We then also got quite a strict policy for who gets a tunnel and
who gets to keep it for at least the public POP's. Each one of
them can have their own policies as they are mostly ISP bound and
thus those users are (paying) customers of that ISP if they do
something that ISP will deal with it.

Having a central server serve a list of available tunnelbrokers
is actually the idea I am taking up for the SixXS project and
mind you is also the thing that Freenet6 is doing already succesfully
for quite some time now.

> [moved this from above]
> > 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.
> 
> This is not all.
> 
> We provide 6to4 relay service to everybody in the world.  
> There is no way we would offer any tunnel brokering (_using our
addresses_) 
> outside our customers.  6to4 is much more provider-neutral on this 
> aspect, which could also be considered as a good thing!

Ah indeed the neutral political problem. This is indeed something
to look at unfortunatly. In SixXS we solved this with the fact
that a POP has a list of policies and based upon those a user can
choose that POP or not or force him to use only that POP.
Eg. the HeaNet POP simply only allows tunnels to prefixes which
are directly peered with HeaNet, thus most of Ireland.

I know also that many ISP's let non-customers use 6bone space and
keep the RIR space for their paying customers. In their respect
RIR space is 'better' IPv6 space then 6bone space and they can
justify this to their paying clients as "they are testing if
it's going to work for you".

As said we hope to finish up the automatic configuration programs asap.
The programs, code and protocol will become public at release.
The reason why we are not using TSP is because it misses quite a couple
of things which we require for the operation of our style of system.
For example automatic dynamic tunnels are not supported easily without
traffic being sent to an unsuspecting dailup user with ZoneAlarm running
You really don't want to know what kind of odd abuse messages alongside
of the threats you get then ;)

Greets,
 Jeroen