On 05/01/17 14:00, Paul Mansfield wrote:
> Someone should set up appropriate logging for the upcoming UKNOF
> meeting to measure the balance of traffic between IPv4 and IPv6, and
> see whether we're all practising what we're preaching ;-)

I wouldn't discourage this, but I would proffer that you're still going
to see quite an imbalance. Whilst IPv6 is available to attendees and
*most* devices will try to use it, too many services are still missing
AAAA records. Google or Netflix might see >50% of their traffic to 5607
go out via IPv6, but the percentile of IPv6 I see going to 5607 is a lot
lower than that.

The reason as far as I can determine, is that whilst we've got thousands
of servers numbered with IPv6 - actively using it for DNS queries and/or
apt updates - in too many cases those servers are hosting services that
don't have AAAA records.

Perhaps the customer doesn't see the benefit yet, doesn't know enough to
confidently wield it, or doesn't want the "hassle" of supporting it. But
because we *just* provide the server & connectivity, we can't force
anyone's hand. Even where we manage a hosting service directly, we might
still not control the domain's records.

Either way, there's very little impetus there for anyone to break
something that is working. If we purposely go out to make our IPv4
connectivity less than good across the board (good luck with that) I
can't imagine it'll be a success.

This is the thin end of the long tail, and it's going to drag on and on
until there's a solid incentive for website maintainers to enable AAAA
records. The goal now has to be for it to be important to those that are
designing, creating or running services, not those that are hosting the
servers.

Perhaps a combination of poor IPv4 connectivity (CGNAT hell) and
positive discrimination by popular search engines will make a AAAA
record a 'must have', but deducting £x/month on the bill just isn't
going to cut it for a service that needs to work flawlessly on both
address families for the foreseeable future.

(The people on this list that also happen to be our customers are going
to be among the exceptions to this, I'd expect - so thank you all. If I
can help you add some AAAA records on a Bytemark service, please let me
know offlist. :))

-- 
Tom Hill
Network Manager

Bytemark Hosting
http://www.bytemark.co.uk/
tel. +44 1904 890 890

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