IPv6 deployment delay

[Staff 9973]

THIS THREAD IS NOW OBSOLETE - PLEASE JUMP HERE: https://airvpn.org/topic/25148-ipv6-support-experimental-phase/

 

Hello!

We regret to inform you that IPv6 full support has been delayed. Here is the current, new roadmap for IPv6 support deployment in our infrastructure:

 

Within 15.Jan.18:

 

- at least one public VPN server supporting IPv6

- release of new Eddie version which fully supports IPv6 routing and any other necessary function

 

If no problems arise, or when unexpected problems are resolved, deployment of IPv6 on all the other VPN servers which are in an IPv6 capable network (i.e. the overwhelming majority in our infrastructure - only 2% of the servers will not support IPv6 due to technical limitations of the datacenter they are in). Such a wide scale deployment will be very fast (a matter of a day or two a few days).

 

We apologize for the inconvenience. We are well aware that full IPv6 support for the end of December 2017 had been planned since 2016 and we'll do our best to minimize the delay.

 

Kind regards and datalove

AirVPN Staff

[zombie1982 5]

Never mind   Take your time, savety first

[Librarian 0]

Out of curiosity, what is the problem preventing IPv6 deployment?

[NaDre 157]

Out of curiosity, what is the problem preventing IPv6 deployment?

My guess is that the main issue is how to adapt the various "advanced" features of Eddie to IPv6. Those of us who do not use Eddie would probably be happy to see them just get the servers up, which would probably not be so much effort, as you appear to have surmised. And they could worry about Eddie later. But they are probably concerned that that would upset too many customers. All of this is of course speculation on my part.

[OmniNegro 155]

For those who do not already know, IPv6 is a really messed up solution to the limitations of IPv4. In fact, it causes many privacy related problems that are very complex to fix for a VPN. The only reason IPv6 was made in the first place was as a solution to the 4 billion IPs available under IPv4. (Imagine how many of the 7 billion people in this world use more than one IP at a time and the problem becomes apparent.)

 

So we can then go read up on IPv6 and see that when it was drafted, it included things that are plainly bad for our privacy. And in addition, most of the Internet works just fine on IPv4 alone.

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv6

[go558a83nk 362]

Clodo mentioned one of the reasons for the delay in another thread.  It seems some of the problem is not AirVPN's fault at all but rather a lack of capability of openvpn.  Thus Air has to workaround.

[Snowplow 2]

Thanks for the update.

 

While I often see the mention of Eddie and issues relating to OpenVPN support --> what about mobile users on OpenVPN?  It's not clear to me whether the ipv6 support is limited to Eddie as a client or also supports OpenVPN on mobile phones.  I'm limited in which mobile carriers I can use based on their conversion to ipv6, hence my interest. 

 

Happy New Year!

[NaDre 157]

Clodo mentioned one of the reasons for the delay in another thread.  It seems some of the problem is not AirVPN's fault at all but rather a lack of capability of openvpn.  Thus Air has to workaround.

 

I would not say "a lack of capability of openvpn". It was a deliberate choice by the OpenVPN team, I think.

 

For IPv4, OpenVPN had some helper/convenience features that were not strictly required - e.g. the option "net_gateway" for the directive "--route", and the environment variable "route_net_gateway". There is no direct translation of these to IPv6. You would have to think in terms of the interface instead. It seems that the OpenVPN team have decided they do not want to go down the road of having helper stuff for IPv6. One can do all that is necessary in some wrapper code, if one wants some unusual routing.

 

I suppose the question could also be asked about what impact the implementation IPv6 will have on the "micro-routing" that AirVPN does. This will be another source of additional work I would say.

[Staff 9973]

Out of curiosity, what is the problem preventing IPv6 deployment?

 

Hello!

Eddie is late in development, for a combination of adverse causes which we are going to list here below. On the server side, OpenVPN has been properly patched and tested. Some parts of code have been rewritten properly to provide a real IPv6 full support (task completed successfully by berserker).

 

@NaDre: currently micro-routing in IPv6 is not fully implemented. It will probably come later.

 

Eddie is late mainly because:

 

• the ISP lines supporting IPv6 which are available to our developers malfunction often. IPv6 goes down frequently. Only in December, the devs reported an IPv6 black out of several days without interruption! Such events force the developers to perform any test remotely, between servers in which IPv6 works properly, and the consequence is a delay in development (one thing is testing from your office and house directly with IPv6, one thing is testing remotely via IPv4 connections controlling remotely IPv6 supporting machines in which you run any new Eddie alpha version). This is a dramatic infrastructural/ISP configuration problem in Italy which we have no control on, of course. We can't even rely on multiple ISPs because a pure IPv6 support is currently not provided by most of italian ISPs.
• we have had a nasty problem which causes a malfunction with usage of IPv6 (in the VPN) from an IPv4 only line. This problem is "nasty" because it occurs only on Windows 7, 8, 10, while on OS X, macOS and GNU/Linux Eddie works just fine with the very same pieces of code. As a consequence, troubleshooting this issue has been time consuming - we want to publish an Eddie version which works on all supported platforms, we don't want to leave Windows behind for obvious reasons

Kind regards

[Staff 9973]

Thanks for the update.

 

While I often see the mention of Eddie and issues relating to OpenVPN support --> what about mobile users on OpenVPN?  It's not clear to me whether the ipv6 support is limited to Eddie as a client or also supports OpenVPN on mobile phones.  I'm limited in which mobile carriers I can use based on their conversion to ipv6, hence my interest. 

 

Happy New Year!

 

Hello and Happy New Year to you too!

 

IPv6 support on server side will be available regardless of the software client used to connect to our VPN servers. We can't categorically rule out that some clients might have problems. We hope not (and we will be testing as soon as our ISPs in Italy provide us with a more decent IPv6 support), but in any case (hear, hear!) we are willing to release Eddie for Android within July 2018 with a lot (if not all!) of the features you find in Eddie for desktop systems.

 

The problem you mention is serious and we think that it might become a widespread issue for mobile users in several countries in 2019. This is the main driving force which convinced AirVPN management to speed up implementation of IPv6 support. Going back to 2014, IPv6 support was vaguely road-mapped for 2019/2020. The decision to "put the deadline 2 years back" was proposed in late 2016 and approved unanimously soon after.

 

Kind regards

[Snowplow 2]

Hello and Happy New Year to you too!

 

IPv6 support on server side will be available regardless of the software client used to connect to our VPN servers. We can't categorically rule out that some clients might have problems. We hope not (and we will be testing as soon as our ISPs in Italy provide us with a more decent IPv6 support), but in any case (hear, hear!) we are willing to release Eddie for Android within July 2018 with a lot (if not all!) of the features you find in Eddie for desktop systems.

 

The problem you mention is serious and we think that it might become a widespread issue for mobile users in several countries in 2019. This is the main driving force which convinced AirVPN management to speed up implementation of IPv6 support. Going back to 2014, IPv6 support was vaguely road-mapped for 2019/2020. The decision to "put the deadline 2 years back" was proposed in late 2016 and approved unanimously soon after.

 

Kind regards

 

Thank you for the information.  Exciting to hear about Eddie for Android....is there any similar plan on the iOS platform?  I'd be surprised given their tight control, but one can hope, as I don't find iOS handles VPN very well, such as lack of a network lock. 

[Clodo 176]

For IPv4, OpenVPN had some helper/convenience features that were not strictly required - e.g. the option "net_gateway" for the directive "--route", and the environment variable "route_net_gateway". There is no direct translation of these to IPv6. You would have to think in terms of the interface instead. It seems that the OpenVPN team have decided they do not want to go down the road of having helper stuff for IPv6. One can do all that is necessary in some wrapper code, if one wants some unusual routing.

Yes, this is an example. Eddie has options related to what routes can go inside or outside the tunnel, based on "net_gateway" and "vpn_gateway" params of 'route' directive.

For IPv6 we need to reimplement the routing-table changes directly from Eddie, for every OS we support.

 

Another example, with a server-side directive

push "redirect-gateway ipv6 def1 bypass-dhcp"

any 2.3 client throws a "unknown push option 'ipv6'" as fatal error, and it's not possible to apply directives based on client version. We implemented a specific patch (only server-side) for this.

[air_is_nice 3]

 

For IPv4, OpenVPN had some helper/convenience features that were not strictly required - e.g. the option "net_gateway" for the directive "--route", and the environment variable "route_net_gateway". There is no direct translation of these to IPv6. You would have to think in terms of the interface instead. It seems that the OpenVPN team have decided they do not want to go down the road of having helper stuff for IPv6. One can do all that is necessary in some wrapper code, if one wants some unusual routing.

Yes, this is an example. Eddie has options related to what routes can go inside or outside the tunnel, based on "net_gateway" and "vpn_gateway" params of 'route' directive.

For IPv6 we need to reimplement the routing-table changes directly from Eddie, for every OS we support.

 

Another example, with a server-side directive

>push "redirect-gateway ipv6 def1 bypass-dhcp"

any 2.3 client throws a "unknown push option 'ipv6'" as fatal error, and it's not possible to apply directives based on client version. We implemented a specific patch (only server-side) for this.

 

 

@Clodo! How is Eddie 3 going? Is there any time-frame (this year?)? I want to be able to minimize to system-tray on linux..

[Guest]

Are the tls-crypt modes/protocols also coming with this as you said here?

 

https://airvpn.org/topic/24547-are-we-going-to-get-ipv6-support-by-new-years/?do=findComment&comment=67770

[Staff 9973]

Are the tls-crypt modes/protocols also coming with this as you said here?

 

https://airvpn.org/topic/24547-are-we-going-to-get-ipv6-support-by-new-years/?do=findComment&comment=67770

 

Hello!

 

Yes.

 

Kind regards

[Clodo 176]

@Clodo! How is Eddie 3 going? Is there any time-frame (this year?)? I want to be able to minimize to system-tray on linux..

"When it's done" . In this year, of course.

 

Minimize in system-tray on Linux will be available in the next 2.x series, around the next week.

[Guest]

 

Thanks for the update.

 

While I often see the mention of Eddie and issues relating to OpenVPN support --> what about mobile users on OpenVPN?  It's not clear to me whether the ipv6 support is limited to Eddie as a client or also supports OpenVPN on mobile phones.  I'm limited in which mobile carriers I can use based on their conversion to ipv6, hence my interest. 

 

Happy New Year!

Hello and Happy New Year to you too!

 

IPv6 support on server side will be available regardless of the software client used to connect to our VPN servers. We can't categorically rule out that some clients might have problems. We hope not (and we will be testing as soon as our ISPs in Italy provide us with a more decent IPv6 support), but in any case (hear, hear!) we are willing to release Eddie for Android within July 2018 with a lot (if not all!) of the features you find in Eddie for desktop systems.

 

The problem you mention is serious and we think that it might become a widespread issue for mobile users in several countries in 2019. This is the main driving force which convinced AirVPN management to speed up implementation of IPv6 support. Going back to 2014, IPv6 support was vaguely road-mapped for 2019/2020. The decision to "put the deadline 2 years back" was proposed in late 2016 and approved unanimously soon after.

 

Kind regards

Can't wait for Android! You guys rock

[air_is_nice 3]

So, any news regarding this? 15 of January is long gone.

[Staff 9973]

So, any news regarding this? 15 of January is long gone.

 

Hello!

We're sorry for the additional delay. We will publish an official announcement in the next 24/48 hours

 

Kind regards

[Guest]

 

So, any news regarding this? 15 of January is long gone.

 

Hello!

We're sorry for the additional delay. We will publish an official announcement in the next 24/48 hours

 

Kind regards

 

Hey - I can't seem to find the announcement anywhere, did you publish it?

[Staff 9973]

Hello!

 

We are providing a quick update on the status of IPv6 and new Eddie deployment.

 

Just a the day before Eddie 2.14alpha was going to be promoted to beta version, two major bugs were discovered and confirmed as reproducible. Such bugs are critical in IPv6 so we were not able to release Eddie in beta version yesterday. Developers are working to identify and fix the code causing both bugs.

 

First IPv6 full-supporting VPN server will be "open to the public" together with the release of Eddie 2.14.x beta.

 

We are unable to set a precise release date as long as the bugs are not fully "understood and isolated" in the source code, but we will keep you informed on developers progress.

 

Kind regards

[NaDre 157]

...

 

First IPv6 full-supporting VPN server will be "open to the public" together with the release of Eddie 2.14.x beta.

 

...

 

So there is absolutely no possibility of a "non-Eddie preview" with just server access so that those of us who do not use Eddie can see how things will be?

[kiwi 16]

Thanks for the update, staff.

[Staff 9973]

 

...

 

First IPv6 full-supporting VPN server will be "open to the public" together with the release of Eddie 2.14.x beta.

 

...

 

So there is absolutely no possibility of a "non-Eddie preview" with just server access so that those of us who do not use Eddie can see how things will be?

 

Hello!

 

We don't rule out this option, although we would prefer a simultaneous launch. Should IPv6 problems with Eddie cause a significant delay in 2.14beta release, we will seriously consider to open the new IPv6 supporting server before Eddie 2.14beta is released.

 

Kind regards

[Guest]

Hi - would it be possible to 'develop in the open' to the extent you publish alpha branch on github? The code is public anyway, and having maybe hundreds of eyes it may be easier for people to spot where an error is happening which can speed it up.