Source
r/ipv6•
tedjp

World IPv6 Day, June 8 2012: Turn it on and leave it on

With the success of World IPv6 Day 2011, it seems the result was that brokenness was very minor and with IPv6 becoming increasingly prominent in peoples minds, how about we have another World IPv6 Day in 2012 for the purpose of enabling IPv6, AAAA records and leaving it on.

It would give slow-movers a target date to aim for rather than dragging their heels indefinitely, and by co-ordinating the "turn-on" of major websites on a single day, there's an improved chance of quick diagnosis & remedy for users with problems.

Posted Jun 9, 2011, 7:51 PM UTC

1613
ragzilla•

Some people are proposing a monthly IPv6 day, if it gains acceptance it should be good for driving out these last few showstopper issues people have in places.

8
sqrt2•

In case anyone is interested, I took the official participants list and queried the listed domain names for AAAA records today. It appears 363 of the 542 listed sites are still reachable via IPv6 (i.e. almost exactly 2/3), most prominently Limelight Networks. I definitely see increased IPv6 traffic on my MTRG graphs after June 8, too.

7
wilsonics•

Thank you very much for these stats! I was wondering who was brave enough to leave v6 on.

1
lutchann•

Have there been any public reports of brokenness experienced "in the wild" during IPv6 day? I saw a vague comment or two on Twitter where people were cursing IPv6 day for breaking things in some unspecified way, but nothing along the lines of "My mother-in-law said Google was broken yesterday so I disabled her IPv6 and that fixed it."

I expect we'll see comprehensive reports from providers in the next few weeks that will help answer the question, but at this point I've seen basically nothing reported to indicate that even one user noticed any problems.

(I did see a couple reports of enterprises discovering problems with their internal IPv6 networks, but that's not the kind of brokenness that IPv6 Day was trying to measure, obviously.)

5
Twirrim•

Yes, all sorts of problems. Look at the NANOG mailing list for examples. Failures on all sorts of equipment by all sorts of vendors, including Cisco, Juniper etc. etc. Microsoft turned it on for their main website but had to turn it off due to problems with vendor hardware. Their Xbox infrastructure runs on different equipment and was able to continue for all the 24 hours.

2
lutchann•

Well, right, there were some infrastructure problems on the provider side. That was no surprise, and should be no concern in the grand scheme of things.

What I'd like to know is the answer to the question that prompted IPv6 day in the first place: how many end users encountered problems due to content providers adding an AAAA record for their main website?

5
Twirrim•

How long is a piece of string? It's an unanswerable question. Most people probably wouldn't even have known what IPv6 was, let alone why they were having problems with the internet. Even then a good number would probably just give up rather than phone their ISP.

I hit some odd problems here despite setting up an HE tunnel in advance. Windows 7 machines picked up the IPv6 network as soon as it was advertised and worked fine. For all of about 2-3 minutes. Then everything stopped. I've got a real mixed environment, Windows (7 & XP), OS X, Linux, FreeBSD, the works. Something, somewhere must have been doing something strange because IPv6 traffic was being routed in bizarre fashion. I've still not tracked down the source of the problem precisely. It could be XP on wireless which is known to advertise strange routes and mess things up.

The net result was that yes, we got AAAA records for all sorts of places (e.g. gmail), but workstations were unable to connect unless the users specifically disabled IPv6.

At home all was fine, DD-WRT on a linksys. Windows & Linux have no problems at all. I've been running a tunnel there for a little while so IPv6 day was nothing of concern.

0
neojima•

Their Xbox infrastructure runs on different equipment and was able to continue for all the 24 hours.

If you're referring to www.xbox.com, it's been running dual-stacked since June 3rd, and is still responding via IPv6.

1
Twirrim•

Not sure what the difference is between pre-IPv6 day and post, but the guys who work on it imply there was a difference, and that whatever changes they made for IPv6 day (presumably just making www.xbox.com return an AAAA record instead of a specific address a la ipv6.google.com?) they're sticking with it.

There are huge long threads about the event here: http://mailman.nanog.org/pipermail/nanog/2011-June/thread.html

1
neojima•

I'm already on the NANOG list, thanks.

Do you have any citations that counter my claims WRT www.xbox.com?

1
baryluk•

Pfff. Turn it on NOW, and leave it on.

2
fragglet•

It actually sounds like a pretty good idea. The problem is that no one company (Google, Microsoft, etc) wants to just turn IPv6 on, because there are so many broken IPv6 installations out there. People would complain that "Google is broken", etc. If everyone agreed, just like with World IPv6 day, to turn it on and leave it on, network administrators would have no choice but to fix their shit.

1
tedjpOP•

Interestingly sixy.ch is showing a lot more high-profile sites being IPv6-enabled now. A week or a month ago it was primarily personal websites, blogs and small, tech-savvy companies. Now there are bigger sites listing themselves as IPv6-enabled, including mozilla.org, fastmail.fm, va.gov and ed.gov.

1