Reporting of Happy Eyeballs Failures
draft-palet-v6ops-he-reporting-00

Abstract

This document describes an extension to Happy Eyeballs in order to report IPv6 failures that force the fall-back to IPv4 and consequently, facilitate the troubleshooting of IPv6 networks.

Status of This Memo

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Copyright Notice

Copyright (c) 2017 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the document authors. All rights reserved.

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Table of Contents

• 1. Introduction
• 2. Using Syslog
• 3. Discovery of the syslog collector NSP
• 4. HE behaviour on failure detection
• 5. Privacy Considerations
• 6. Security Considerations
• 7. IANA Considerations
• 8. Acknowledgements
• 9. Normative References
• Authors' Addresses

1. Introduction

Happy Eyeballs ([RFC6555]) provides a way for improving user-visible delay when IPv6 connectivity is performing worse than the IPv4 one.

However, this hides the possible IPv6 connectivity issues to the operator because users don't notice anything broken, so they aren't reporting it to their providers.

The goal of this document is to specify an extension of HE, in order to use existing protocols for providing a reporting to the operator, which can be used to setup alarms and trigger further investigation so to improve network reliability, facilitating the detection of failures as soon as they appear, without the need of external monitoring.

2. Using Syslog

In order to simplify the reporting of the HE failures, syslog ([RFC5424]) over UDP ([RFC5426]), MUST be used, by means of the default port (514) with IPv6-only.

The intend is to make this reporting very simple, so no choice of alternative ports or transport protocols is offered.

Operators willing to use this reporting MUST configure at least one syslog collector at the IPv6 prefix formed as:

Network-Specific Prefix::192.88.99.1

The Network-Specific Prefix (NSP) MUST be chosen by the operator from its RIR allocated IPv6 addressing space.

Additional collectors can be made available by using anycast at the NSP + 192.88.99.0/24 prefix

3. Discovery of the syslog collector NSP

The same mechanism described by RFC7050 ([RFC7050]) should be used to define the address of the syslog collector(s).

Because the collectors will be using an IPv6 address with the 32 low order bits from the reserved range 192.88.99.0/24, this will not be in conflict with any public addresses used in Internet, so this mechanism is compatible with the expected usage of the NSP for NAT64.

4. HE behaviour on failure detection

This section will specify the exact behaviour of HE in order to initiate the reporting and the specific format/parameters of the HE failure message to be sent to the syslog collector.

A preliminary consideration is to include, in addition to the syslog required parameters, the timeouts detected, the failed destination address and the source prefix from where the destination has failed.

TBD.

5. Privacy Considerations

The goal is to provide the operator information about the failures detected by HE, without requiring specific users traffic information. Towards this, it will be sufficient to provide to the syslog collector details about the failed destination address and source prefix. So privacy issues regarding identification of a specific device or users are avoided.

Nowadays, operators already log this information in order to comply with lawful interception regulations, and in general, data protection regulations allow this logging when technically required. Data protection regulations explicitly say that the data can't be disclosed, and there is no need to do so.

In general, vendors also collect telemetry data from devices, in order to improve OSs and in some situations, there are regulations that enforce offering the user to enable/disable that feature. So we could consider offering the same feature for this mechanism.

When the mechanism described in this document detects a failure, the operator will need to find if the problem is related to:

• A specific user (inside the customer local networks, or even at their WAN router).
• A group of users (e.g., one or several part of the access or distribution networks).
• The entire operator network (e.g., core network or transit router/s).
• The destination network.
• Somewhere else in the path to the destination (e.g., transit providers).

Those cases, in terms of privacy considerations, will fall into one of the following categories:

1. Failure cause is internal to a specific customer (LANs or router/s): The operator may decide, depending on their country regulations and services offered to that customer, to inform the customer (and decide what information is provided), or ignore the failure and include it in a "while list" (i.e., list of "don't care" failures), so the monitoring system doesn't keep providing alerts on it.
2. Failure cause is due to the operator network: The operator will need to find the cause and fix the failure, without disclosing any personal data.
3. Failure cause is due to third parties: The operator don't need to disclose any specific user source address/prefix, because in this case, the shorter prefix (typically the RIR allocated prefix or part of it, when is being announced split among different BGP peers), from which the failure has been verified.

In the most extreme case, a more restrictive usage of this procedure, not involving logging any user source address/prefix, will be to log only the failed destination address. In a big percentage of the cases, it will be enough for the operator to detect the failure, as experience shows that HE fall-back occurs mainly because path or destination misconfiguration or issues. So, the ISP could replicate the failure from any other source address in its network to the same failed destination. If we take this approach, failures internal to a specific customer, could not be reported by the operator to the customer (as there is no source data logging), and together with partial failures of the operator network will require extra work from operator's staff to research the cause of the failure (i.e., it is in my network, part of it, a specific customer or external).

So, there is no distinction between the privacy issues from this protocol compared to regular network operation, abuse reporting, etc.

6. Security Considerations

This document does not have any specific security considerations.

7. IANA Considerations

IANA is requested to reserve 192.88.99.0/24 for this RFC, which was previously released by ([RFC7526]).

8. Acknowledgements

The author would like to acknowledge the inputs of TBD ...

9. Normative References

Authors' Addresses