[v6test] Concerns about network impact

[Iljitsch van Beijnum]

On 12 jan 2008, at 2:53, Kevin Day wrote:

> For #1 and #2, we're going to suggest to networks that feel their
> network is going to break to preemptively block or rate-limit access
> to the IPs used for this experiment.

> Thoughts? Comments?

I would suggest a different strategy. Rate limiting is not an easy  
thing to do (depending on equipment), and especially not easy to do in  
a TCP-friendly way. (I.e., just dropping the packets over a certain  
bps limit is deadly for TCP performance.)

It would be great if some kind of limiting could be implemented at the  
side of the experiment server(s). That way, operators only need to  
communicate their address blocks and acceptable bandwidth figures. I  
believe there are web servers that can handle traffic/user limitations.

Also, how do you plan on talking to 6to4 users? Using native  
connectivity or by having a local 6to4 relay? Since the majority of  
the traffic is from the experiment servers to the users, having a  
local relay means that the traffic is pretty much end-to-end IPv4. If  
you send it out natively, you just test the capacity of the closest  
public relay.

One approach could be to have a landing page that redirects people  
(and possibly implements user limitations for users of IPv6- 
constrained ISPs) so you can experiment with redirecting 6to4 users to  
a 6to4 address for the service, which means that there are no 6to4  
relays in the path from the user to the service either, or redirecting  
6to4 users to a native address so there are relays in the path.

Iljitsch