Re: dual stack & IPv6 on by default

[Ronald van der Pol <Ronald.vanderPol@rvdp.org>]

On Thu, Feb 27, 2003 at 16:10:49 -0800, Alain Durand wrote:

> My colleagues (Sebastien Roy & Jim Paugh) from Sun & I wrote a draft
> on dual stack implementations and turning IPv6 on by default on them.
> 
> http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-roy-v6ops-v6onbydefault-00.txt
> 
> We would like to offer it as a contribution to v6ops
> and would like to receive feedback from the wg.

Thanks. I think you raise some important issues.

At this moment, I think IPv6 is not yet ready for the general public.
There still are too many connectivity problems (early adoptors however
_should_ use IPv6 to sort out these problems).

<cite>
2.  No IPv6 Router

   Neighbor Discovery's [1] conceptual sending algorithm dictates that
   when sending a packet to a destination, if a host's default router
   list is empty, then the host assumes that the destination is on-link.
</cite>

Hmm, that sounds reasonable in an IPv6-only environment, but not in a
dual stack environment. A good example why this document is useful.

<cite>
4.  Poor IPv6 Network Performance
</cite>

Is this different from IPv4-only networks? In such networks there
can also be different paths and the path with the lowest cost can
have the highest packet loss.

<cite>
4.1.  Dealing with Poor IPv6 Network Performance

Not much can be done in this case other than configure each node to
prefer IPv4 destinations over IPv6.
</cite>

A lot can be done, the network should be fixed :-) I think you mean
the end host can not do much. Preferring IPv4 over IPv6 could be
one solution. Another could be disabling IPv6. That may be clearer
to the end user. It basically says: don't enable IPv6 unless you
are sure you have good IPv6 connectivity (or know what you are
doing).

	rvdp