Friday 12 August 2011

Post mortem: IPv6 Day

The day seemed to go pretty smoothly in general. Whilst a lot of the main contenders switched IPv6 off again, it was said that 2/3 actually maintained IPv6 functionality after the day (see IETF talk below). Well when I say they switched it off - The visible aspect was to remove their IPv6 addresses (their AAAA records) for their main sites from the Internet's Domain Name Service (DNS) again. However a lot of work went on under the hood: Lots of web helper stuff to notify people if there was a problem, Various mods to custom code, and various dual stack proxies and some tunnels to provide IPv6. The main players do have IPv6 versions of their sites accessible both before and after the day - only they're either on a separate domain name (e.g. ipv6.google.com). A number of these folks put up their own post mortem analysis pages (yes some of them did use some 1337 Hack0r IPv6 names;) : FACE::B00C, Google, C:15C0:D06:F00D, ISOC.Though probably the most in-depth analysis was provided in a presentation (by a combination of key players) at the IETF81 in July at Quebec, with good coverage from Arstechnica.

It seems that there are browser tricks to speed up IPv6 failover and now even OS level approaches to provide for it - notably OSX Lion has introduced some new black magic for IPv6 path selection.

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