IPv6 for country mirrors

[Berge Schwebs Bjørlo]

On Sun, May 03, 2020 at 03:56:25PM +0200, Michael Hock wrote:
> Would it be possible to provide sort of a fallback IPv6 address for all the
> country specific mirrors, so it would at least work if there is only IPv6
> connectivity to the public internet?

The problem with that approach is that clients will default to IPv6. Imagine
a client in a country that good local IPv4 connectivity and a local country
mirror, but poor (or expensive) international (IPv6) connectivity. A
dual-stack client would be much better off using the nearby IPv4 mirror.

> Reaching out to individual mirror operators was not successful (tried to
> contact a few, they're not seeing it in their responsibility to provide
> IPv6 connectivity to their mirrors).

Note that a few big and high capacity mirrors do have v6 connectivity, at
least in Europe – the NL, DK, SE and NO mirrors has a combined capacity of
60Gbit high-quality IPv6 connectivity, and the main mirrors
(archive.ubuntu.com) are also v6-enabled.

The big cloud providers also has some v6 mirrors;
https://packages.cloud.google.com/apt/dists/ubuntu-bionic-mirror/ comes to
mind. It's probably anycasted around the world.

> So I hope there are more people willing to either upgrade their current
> mirrors to also provide IPv6, or to set up additional (IPv6 only) mirrors
> which are then added as DNS AAAA records to existing country specific
> mirrors.

I guess one possibility is to have a v6-only DNS tree for it, such as
<countrycode>.v6.archive.ubuntu.com, with defaults for big country mirrors.

-Berge
(not a Canonical employee, just a random mirror operator)

-- 
Berge Schwebs Bjørlo
Try SCE to AUX.