[99284] in North American Network Operators' Group
Apple Airport Extreme IPv6 problems?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Barrett Lyon)
Sat Sep 15 12:06:46 2007
In-Reply-To: <FA6FFD57-4AE9-4C09-9E64-1DA6F5F6A63E@blyon.com>
From: Barrett Lyon <blyon@blyon.com>
Date: Sat, 15 Sep 2007 09:05:43 -0700
To: nanog@merit.edu
Errors-To: owner-nanog@merit.edu
Apple is nice enough to provide an automatic v6 tunnel from their new
Airport Extreme units. They even get all the machines on the network
to participate -- by default! At first this did not seem to be much
of an issue, it was even pretty cool.
However, I noticed as I roll out more v6 services to support native
v6 users, I am impacting the network performance of almost all of the
Apple airport population that has an inefficient tunnel
configuration. The user obviously will take the AAAA v6 published IP
over the v4 A record.
Don't get me wrong v6 tunnels are great, when you opt-in and know
what you are getting into. For example, my grandparents tunnel in
California goes to Virginia. This impacts the user experience rather
significantly with the first hop being nearly 100ms where their
services to California are ~20ms. It's painful for a lot of users,
especially when they don't even know what's going on.
Has anyone else ran into this? It's not pretty for a CDN or anyone
trying to provide a quality service over v6, shunting users over
inefficiently tunneled routes does not sit well with me. I think
Apple has made a mistake by enabling this by default.
-Barrett
