Dear Geoff; On Tue, Apr 24, 2012 at 12:41 PM, Geoff Huston <gih@apnic.net> wrote:

Hi,

In 2010, and again in 2011, I ran an experiment to examine the "dark" traffic in IPv6. I did this by announcing the "superblock" 2400::/12 which has been allocated to APNIC for its IPv6 allocations. The superblock announcement is an aggregate and will not disrupt any IPv6 traffic - the packets that will head to this dark traffic collector were on their way to /dev/null in any case.

We are about to run this experiment up again to collect a 2012 data profile for IPv6 dark traffic in 2012. Accordingly, 2400::/12 will be announced by AS3562 - please don't filter it! IPv6 packets are scarce enough already! :-)

As the IPv6 UDP Checksum relaxation effort gets instantiated (the draft http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-6man-udpchecksums-02 is now in WGLC), could you look at the existence (or lack thereof) of UDP checksums in IPV6 ? It would be good to have some baseline data to see, if these become a problem in the future, what the state was before they were adopted. Regards Marshall

This time around we are being assisted by Sandia National Laboratories and ESnet, for which APNIC would like to acknowledge their assistance in this ongoing research activity.

Some URLs:  - ESnet news item is at: http://www.es.net/services/ipv6-network/esnet-supports-sandia-and-apnic-ipv6...  - LOA for the announcement: http://www.sandia.gov/apnic/authorization.pdf  - Previous re[port: http://www.potaroo.net/ispcol/2010-07/dark6.pdf

thanks,

  Geoff