IPv6 multi homing

IPv6 multi homing understood or not?

Well, I understand that I"m probably working on something that's not yet fully understood: IPv6 multi homing.

Use two internet connections

As we have two ISP's that both use private addresses for their end users I don't have a public IPv4 address, which was one of the reasons to early adapt IPv6.

World IPv6 Day put my attention back to IPv6 even though it's not my/our main business, so during the last week or so I finalized my IPv6 setup for our home office:

I am using a Gogo6 tunnel to two Gogo6 locations.
Each of those tunnels gives me a /56 network.
I put two addresses to each of my routers, one based on the first /56, one on the second
I advertised the routes to the Gogo6 network.

Two logical IPv6 networks on one physical?

Of course my main question is what is actually happening now and my main interest is still using both connections at the same time to speed up my internet and my secondary interest is to have a fallback to one of the networks in case one connection breaks.

Of course the last I don't have any control over as I don't control how far my networks are 'advertised' into the IPv6 network.

After reading some articles about IPv6 multi homing I realized there is no final solution for that (yet). Or is there?

Feedback/cooperation very welcome

If you have any comments or are interested in cooperating just e-mail me at guus@activediscovery.net.

And just found this link: http://www.consulintel.euro6ix.org/ietf/draft-palet-multi6-scenarios-00.txt.

And this: https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc4177.txt.

Created on: 2011-06-14 16:51:18

Last edited: 2011-06-14 17:11:46

Views: 631

World IPv6 Day

Well, actually I expected a lot of IPv6 things around World IPv6 Day, but it seems actually nothing really happened. Slightly higher traffic to this site, but actually hardly noticable.

Our internal network

What did happen here locally is that I found out that we had misconfigured our local system. It appeared we set up too many routes. Also at the last minute I tried to make use of both our internet connections at the same time. That's a long time wish and last week we managed to do so and it should still work.

The main difference, multiple logical network next to each other

Well, what else to wrtie here in this article. Nothing much actually as the experience with our duplicate setup is more something for another item. I might just create that soon after. Maybe one secret: basically routing in IPv6 is the same as in IPv6, except network devices can have multiple ip addresses, which also means a physical network can have or normally has multiple logical networks. This might have and had consequences in our case with the two connections as each connection has it's own subnet.

Was Microsoft wrong?

And of course Microsoft surprised everyone with their 'patch' with which you could immediately fall back to IPv4 if the IPv6 prioritization did not work. At first I agreed with the people writing the stories about it: World IPv6 Day was supposed to make problems visible, so 'patching' it would kind of counteract that experience. However, after I thought about it I could also imagine if you have a large company (or a small) and you find out your setup is fullly wrong you might not want to wait for a whole day to pass without internet connection. So forgiven Microsoft.

Created on: 2011-06-10 12:50:27

Last edited: 2011-06-10 12:50:27

Views: 63

Firewall needed

For quite a while I have been running an IPv6 connection over an IPv4 tunnel without really bothering about firewall stuff. However, theoretically it makes our company servers, that are normally hidden behind double NAT routing (ISP and our own routers), vulnarable to attacks, even though I trust Microsoft very much in it's security.

Also IPv6 seem still not really an issue in the practical internet world, however, I guess it will soon become an issue as the last IPv4 ranges have been given out by ICANN.

So I guess it's time to install an IPv6 firewall for our system as I may also want it know to the world and do some testing with it. Something for future articles I guess and it may be useful for many people.

Created on: 2011-03-20 02:36:31

Last edited: 2011-03-20 02:36:31

Views: 233

IPV4 exhaustion

So how bad is it?

Well, we don't hear much about the IPV4 exhaustion really, while according to the down counter it should be very fast now. Of course there are all kinds of ways to bypass the need for additional ip addresses in IPV4 in web clients as well as web servers. So how big is the problem really I'm often asking myself. The only way we, being a web development company, need different ip addresses is when we want to use an SSL connection, although I guess that can also be easily installed on the same ip address.

I'm also still amazed that ISP's don't seem to push IPV6, as they seem to have had the problem. However, here in The Philippines normally you just get a private ip address from your ISP, so no real need.

Disadvantages

Big disadvantage on the private site (computer users at home) could be that normally behind your NAT router you kind of automatically have a firewall. With IPV6 you would lose that protection of course.

And of course home router builders and sellers will not be happy with IPV6, as home routers would simply not be needed anymore as you don't need support for connecting different computers to one ip address given by the ISP.