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Operational Experience with IPv6

Bob FinkLBNL/ESnet

NANOG19

Albuquerque, NM 11-13 June 2000

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This session

• Brief talks on our IPv6 experiences

– Bob Fink 6bone, Esnet, 6tap– Greg Miller MCI WorldCom, vBNS

– Bill Maton CRC, Canarie

– Rob Rockell Sprint

– Sean Mentzer Qwest

• Panel Q&A session– Bob Fink moderator

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The 6bone

• First IPv6 packets in mid-1996 between a few sites in Europe, Japan and US

• started with tunnels (v6 encapsulated in v4), now moving to more native links

• primary goal to test implementations, their interoperability, that the standards work and provide feedback to the IETF

• … and to get early operational experience

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6bone today (as of 5Jun00)

• Now in 46 countries AR, AU, AT, BE, BR, BG, CM, CA, CN, CZ, DK, EE, FI, FR, DE, GR, HK, HU, IN, IE, IT, JP, KZ, KR, LT, MY, MX, NL, NZ, NO, PL, PT, RO, RU, SG, SK, SI, ZA, ES, SE, CH, TW, UA, GB, US, UY

• 571 networks/sites 135 US, 66 DE, 38 JP, 28 FR, 28 GB(UK), 20 SE, 10 CN, 9 RU, 4 MX etc.

• 68 pTLA’s most recent addition: UUNET 27Apr00

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Primary lessons

• Besides implementations and standards issues that come up and are corrected...

• overall IPv6 does act and work like IPv4

• Though we started with static routes, IDRPv6 and RIPng, everyone wanted BGP4 and we moved to it fast

• It has not been hard to setup, manage, maintain and operate IPv6 nets (again, it is like IPv4… funny thing :-) I’ll leave it to other panel members for more

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6bone (IPv6) Registry

• From the start of the 6bone project a registry was used to keep track of at least the top tier networks, their peerings and prefix allocations

• RIPE-style db developed by David Kessens then of ISI, now of Nokia

• He added ipv6-site and inet6num objects

• Has proven invaluable for net reports, measurement, management and peering

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Network Tools for tracking problems

• Merit IPv6 Routing report (daily)

–Size of 6Bone Routing Table

–BGP4+ Traffic Summary

–Unknown AS Numbers

–Unknown Prefixes

–Poorly Aggregated Announcements

–Prefixes from Different Origin AS

–Most Active Prefixes

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Contd.

• CSELT (Italy) BGP4+ Operational report using Aspath-tree tool

–Graphic display of BGP4+ routing entries –Odd routes reports

»invalid & unaggregated prefixes–Routing Stability Report

–Routing History graphs

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Example CSELT routing history graph

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Contd.

• SLAC PingER services uses a modified IPv6 ping service to probe and report on path reliability

– data is databased and historically accessibel: hour, day, month

– TCP Throughput

– Zero packet loss frequency

– PING unpredictability & unreachability

– Packet loss

– PING response history

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Automated mapping services

• Among other things the 6bone registry is used for, it can help generates pictures of the 6bone pTLA backbone network peering relationships

• Lancaster Univ. have done much of this work

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6bone future

• Will stay in place until no longer needed

• excellent place for an ISP to get early experience before going into production

• probably not the best way to support transition to IPv6, but if needed for this it will stay in place

• expect that the 6to4 Transition Mechanism and native IPv6 support by your IPv4 ISP is best to support transition

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Aggregatable Unicast Addressing

001 TLA

3 13 24 16 64

NLA SLA Interface ID

TLA = Top-Level Aggregation ID - are assigned to ISPs and Exchanges that act in a default-free way with a routing table entry for every active TLA ID (helps constrain the routing complexity)

Rsrv = Reserved for either TLA or NLA expansion

NLA = Next Level Aggregation ID - are assigned by TLAs to create a multi-level hierarchy underneath it as the ISP chooses (i.e., multiple NLA levels allow more ISPs and then the end site)

SLA = Site Level Aggregation IDs are used to create local addressing hierarchy (e.g., a flat subnet space allowing 65K subnets)

Interface ID = unique ID on subnet (typically formed automatically)

8Rsrv

48-bit Public TopologyRouting Prefix

80-bit end-site specific usageISP cannot change this

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Current TLA assignments

• TESTING (3FFE::/16) assigned for IETF ngtrans use by RFC 2471 for use by 6bone project - currently used for pTLA’s

• Sub-TLA’s (2001::/16) assigned to RIR’s for allocation of Sub-TLA’s

• 6to4 prefix (2002::/16) assigned for use by the “Connection of IPv6 Domains via IPv4 Clouds without Explicit Tunnels” spec (soon to be at PS) to hold the IPv4 tunnel endpoint address in the 32-bit Rsrv & NLA fields

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6bone (IPv6 testbed) pTLA’s

• The 6bone uses a variation of this concept called pseudo-TLAs (pTLAs)

3FFE:0000::/24 to 3FFE:7F00::/24 old 8-bit pTLA space

3FFE:8000::/28 to 3FFE:FFF0::/28 new 12-bit pTLA space

001TLA

0x1FFE

3 13 24 or 20 16 64

NLA SLA Interface ID

8 or 12

pseudoTLA

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Sub-TLA’s

001TLA

0xOOO1

3 13 13 16 64

NLA SLA Interface ID

13

SubTLA

• To assist in the slow start of TLA assignment, a Sub-TLA was defined which allows the international address registries to slow start TLA usage by just assigning a single TLA for Sub-TLA’s

• an ISP must demonstrate high usage of its Sub-TLA space before qualifying for a TLA or another Sub-TLA

• in practice, the RIR’s are slow starting the /29 space by only assigning /35’s to start… again, a high usage required before getting more of the /29

6Rsrv

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Sub-TLA usage today

• RIR’s started to assign in July 1999,34 assigned to date

– APNIC (13 Sub-TLA’s assigned)

– ARIN (4 Sub-TLA’s assigned)

– RIPE-NCC (17 Sub-TLA’s assigned)

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6to4

• Specifies the 16-bit TLA prefix 2002::/16as a “6to4” flag indicating that the 32-bit sized NLA below it carries an IPv4 Tunnel Endpoint Address of the site’s egress router

001TLA

0x002

3 13 16 64

IPv4 TEA SLA Interface ID

32

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ESnet

• ESnet serves the network needs of the US Energy Research national labs, which is now IPv4 (just turned off DecNET :-)

• early participant in 6bone using tunnels, then moved to native IPv6 in 1999

• operates a Cisco IPv6 EFT router mesh over the ESnet ATM cloud

• as of July 1999 ESnet operational staff handles IPv6 peering and routing in parallel with, and the same as IPv4

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Application usage

• For now usage limited to early application conversion (to the IPv6 API) and demonstration that high-profile scientific apps run over IPv6 the same as IPv4

• also a significant network measurement activity in place

• software (versus hardware) IPv6 packet forwarding ok for most early purposes, but it does get in way of the high-speed scientific apps… were waiting too!

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The 6TAP

• To facilitate peering of native IPv6 providers, ESnet and Canarie/Viagenie formed the 6tap IPv6 routing service in August 1999 at the StarTAP/ChicagoNAP

• Working with Sun and Merit to get early an early IPv6 Route Server up

• Working with early IPv6 ISP’s to establish BGP4+ routing policies and practices

• A 6to4 Relay service and a Site-Tunnel-Server service will also be provided soon

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What next

• Waiting for production hardware-based routers so we can operate v4 & v6 in same routers

• … and of course for production IPv6 host code to become widely available

• meanwhile, it is quite cheap and easy to put up some IPv6 routing to gain knowledge and early operational experience

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Thanks for listening

Pointer to everything IPv6:

www.6bone.net

Questions on anything IPv6 (don’t worry, I’ll forward you to the right place):

fink@es.net