[Ninux-Wireless] [blog] Getting ready to World IPv6 Day 2012

[ZioPRoTo]

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'Getting ready to World IPv6 Day 2012' di ZioPRoTo

Download this press release in pdf from here
Download here the Ninux Roma Routing Architecture -Version 0
Introduction
A few months ago we published a graph on our homepage that shows in real time
the last 24 hours of the bandwidth usage of our main IPv6 peering link.



We started our IPv6 deployment in March 2011. Unidata, an ISP operating in the
area of Rome (Italy), offered us the chance to make an IPv6 BGP peering
providing to us free transit to the public Internet (IPv6 only).
We accepted immediately this chance to experiment with IPv6, as since the
beginning of our community network, making experiments with new technology has
been a leading factor.
We already had a private peering with Ydea.com, to route a few IPv4 addresses we
used for mail servers and other lightweight services. To set up the second
peering we started to think of the new network architecture and we faced how to
pay the necessary resources.
In the early days of Ninux we started “playing” with wireless equipment
together with Iacopo Iacarelli, the owner of Ydea.com. Our stories are
different, because Ydea.com is a wireless ISP and we are a community network,
but our relationship grew bigger and bigger over time, so he was very happy to
help us out by giving us some useful tips to deal with the LIR, a required step
to obtain the necessary resources.
We first upgraded our private peering with Ydea.com to a public peering, once
our public AS number was registered at RIPE.
The 8th of April 2011 we installed our antenna on the roof of the Unidata PoP
located in the eastern suburbs of Rome. We installed our second BGP router, a
Linux Server running Quagga (the hardware was kindly offered by Unidata).
The 24th of May 2011 we had our IPv6 address block 2001:4c00:893b::/48 ready to
use.
To make sure it all worked well we moved by little steps. At Ninux we don’t
have a vendor that provides hardware and software upgrades, like it happens with
large scale ISPs. We have a software team that builds firmware on top of
devices. Firmware are open source like in Pisa (OpenWRT firmware) or based on
some vendor product that has an available SDK, as in Rome where we use AirOS by
Ubiquiti.
Because we were not sure that the new firmware was stable enough, at first we
upgraded just a few nodes to connect the Ninux Farm to the BGP router at the
edge of the network. The upgrade of this 4 nodes was not critical for the whole
network, and it was a perfect test playground to generate enough traffic.
You can see the nodes involved in the first experiment on our mapserver at these
links:
http://map.ninux.org/select/ninuxfarm/
http://map.ninux.org/select/tecnopolo/
http://map.ninux.org/select/fishsupernode/


Problems
We started working to provide native IPv6 access to the servers in the Ninux
Server Farm, and we faced the first problems.
The hardest problem we faced was to have IPv6 support on our backbone devices.
The Ninux.org backbone runs mostly on Ubiquiti devices of the M-Series. Running
OpenWRT on these devices would give total IPv6 support, however the open source
drivers coming with OpenWRT are not as stable as the proprietary ones embedded
in the AirOS firmware, leading to poor performances when using OpenWRT.
Using the AirOS SDK we developed ourselves our own IPv6 solution, but we
couldn’t get something really stable until  the end of september.
We had to face some problems, because Ubiquiti is very fast in releasing new
firmware versions when there is a bug, but the SDK release is somehow delayed.
So to speed up testing and development, in August we had to reverse engineer
their latest firmware.
After a lot of work we have now a stable firmware :)
We published here the patches to apply on top of the Ubiquiti SDK to have a IPv6
OLSR router:
https://github.com/ninuxorg/UbntM5AirOsOLSR/tree/master/patches/AirOS5.3.3

Stateless addresses
When starting with IPv6 you have to give IPv6 addresses to the devices of your
network. We had a /48 to be partitioned.
IPv6 gives enough room for messy address management without easily run into a
collision of addresses. At first we used a wiki page, and everybody was taking
note of the /64 used for his home.
The easier way to deliver an IP address to the end users was using radvd
directly on the OLSR routers. However we had a lot of flaps because the routers
were changing IP addresses. Soon we realized that we had to disable routing
advertisements on routers that had already a manually configured IPv6 address.
echo 0 > /proc/sys/net/ipv6/conf/all/accept_ra

BGP and IGP
The Ninux network in Rome had just IPv4 private addresses. The routing protocol
used is OLSR. Connecting to the big Internet we started to identify OLSR as our
IGP protocol. We upgraded the network to run in dual stack IPv4 and IPv6, so
running two instances of the OLSR protocol. After configuring some stuff without
a real plan, we started to write a real routing architecture, that you can find
now on our web site.
When you have only one peering point with a single upstream provider, it is
enough to redistribute via BGP to your upstream a static route that matches all
your address space. But if you have different peering points in your network,
then you need to redistribute IGP routers to BGP to understand what is really
reachable and should be announced.
This was not trivial, because we use OLSR as IGP routing protocol, and the
integration with Quagga is still experimental. We are still testing Quagga
version 0.99.21 with this patch
https://dev.openwrt.org/browser/packages/net/quagga/patches/120-quagga_manet.patch

Public Services
We are very happy to run a network that is ready for IPv6. Our users are using
IPv6 services since several months, and we expect this traffic to increase the
6th of June 2012.
In addition to normal IPv6 Internet access we also set up some IPv6 services for
our community members and for the all Internet:


	Jabber XMPP server: A Jabber server running ejabberd is available with both
public ipv6 and ipv4 address at jabber.ninux.org. The server is federated with
the rest of the XMPP network and has proven a useful service for our community.
More information (in Italian) can be found here: http://wiki.ninux.org/Jabber.
	Openarena: Openarena is a first person shooting game based on the open sourced
quake3 engine. An Openarena server is available at cleopatra.ninux.org:27960.
More information (in Italian) can be found here:
http://wiki.ninux.org/openarena_it.
	Mumble server: Mumble is an open source low latency voice chat software that is
really useful for quick conferences.
The server has public IPv6 2001:4c00:893b:f2::2 and is reachable at port 64738.
More information (in Italian) can be found here: http://wiki.ninux.org/Mumble.
	Owncloud: Owncloud is an open source web application built in php that offers
dropbox-like functionalities, we use it successfully to store documentation of
our activities, like photos taken while building nodes or videos recorded at our
events. But we don’t use it only internally, infact we also allow other people
who are not yet connected to our network to send us data: we often ask newcomers
to send us photo taken on their roof in order to understand if we can connect
them to any of our nodes, when they ask how they can send us the photos we
usually give them access to our owncloud server.It has proved to be an useful
and reliable service for our community.The server is reachable at
https://obelix.ninux.org/owncloud/ with public ipv6
2001:4c00:893b:fa:230:48ff:fe73:53d.

Conclusion
The Ninux network is now ready for IPv6. Once we fixed the problems described in
this document we updated all the nodes of the network. We have now 139 prefixes
of size /64 active in our network. To the best of our knowledge we are one of
the first Italian networks to deliver native IPv6 access to the home of Internet
users.
After 1 year of testing and developing we feel ready for the world IPv6 day, and
we are very proud of our experimentation done completely no profit in the spirit
of free and open source software.
We hope to see our IPv6 traffic increase on June the 6th !
We want to thank our upstream providers, Unidata, Ydea and E4A. We are very
happy to cooperate with experienced companies that have worked for many years in
the field of networking, it is a fantastic example of how the open source
community can create chances for cooperation and innovation.

http://blog.ninux.org/2012/06/06/the-ipv6-deployment-in-the-ninux-community-network/

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