Attachment point to 6bone

[Bob Fink]

Jarius,

At 8:45 PM -0700 4/21/97, Jarius Jenkins wrote:
>Hello,
>	I am looking to attach a couple of machines to the 6bone. Right
>now I have 1 Linux machine, 1 Sparc/Solaris, and 1 Windows95 Machine. I
>work for an Internet Service Provider in Japan, and have contacted WIDE
>about a connection. They informed me that theirs is for research only, and
>wanted to know what research I could provide them with. At this point, I
>have no specific "research" under which to connect to them... In the
>future we will be looking into integrating this with our customer base
>(obviously a while off now), but for now I am just trying to get things
>set up.
>	I have the information for my systems now, but we will be swithing
>from our current connection of 1 64k lan connection, and 1 128k connection
>to two 128k connections (obtaining new IP addresses and probably with
>different ASN's from the current connections). As for the future, we are
>connected through two of Japan's giants in telecommunications, and have
>greater than 15Mbps bandwidth to our servers, but those are offsite, and
>will only obtain IPV6 connections after they have been tested inhouse, and
>have been proven to work.

Sorry to be so slow in getting a response to you.

At the current time the 6bone isn't a production network, it is a testing
network (see below).  We certainly hope there will be a time when it turns
into a real production network, but that is still in the future.

Until that point in time the only thing you could do was try it out, learn
from it and feedback into the product development and IETF community what
you learn.

In that context any 6bone backbone site should be willing to let you have a
tunnel to them as it should be in line with their mission on the 6bone as
well.

Having said that, I appreciate that any given site might choose to try some
real production application use (i.e. not testing in the 6bone definition)
that could give a 6bone backbone or transit site difficulty with
appropriate use.  This is a hard situation to actually define (i.e., where
it cannot be construed as IPv6 testing in some fashion), but I think we
need to admit that it will happen.

Thus I believe that in this (real production) case it is incumbent on the
user to:  (1) find a way to tunnel so that their IPv4 connectivity would
route their traffic in a way compatible with their existing appropriate use
agreements for production use; (2) let the 6bone participants know so there
can be an agreement as to how to characterize the use, and what to do (use
the 6bone as is or (1) above).


Reading what you say above, I suspect you would characterize your 6bone
usage as testing of IPv6, not production.  Then you should have no trouble
convincing any 6bone backbone or transit site, including WIDE for example,
to give you a "connection".


Though I'm sure my response to you here will generate some comment, I am
very glad you inadvertently brought it up as you are certainly not the only
site that will find yourself in the situation of wanting to move from
testing over the 6bone to finding real IPv6 Internet connectivity.  We all
hope that the 6bone will turn from one to the other as appropriate.


Thanks,

Bob

==========================================================================
Draft 6bone Charter as presented at the BOF

The 6bone Working Group is a forum for information concerning the
deployment, engineering, and operation of ipv6 protocols and procedures
in the global Internet. This activity will include, but not be limited to:

- Deployment of ipv6 transport and routing in the global Internet via a
"6bone" testbed to assist in the following.

- Creation of "practice and experience" informational RFC documents that
capture the experiences of those who have deployed, and are deploying,
various ipv6 technologies.

- Feedback to various IETF ipv6-related activities, based on testbed
experience, where appropriate.

- Development of mechanisms and procedures to aid in the transition to
native ipv6, where appropriate.

- Development of mechanisms and procedures for sharing operational
information to aid in operation of global ipv6 routing.

-end