Accelerating IPv6 Adoption With Proxy Servers

jgarzik writes "IPv6 presents a catch-22: the most popular web sites on the Internet don't have any incentive to switch to IPv6 until a large portion of their userbase is on IPv6, and their user base does not have a large incentive to switch to IPv6 until many of the popular Internet destinations support IPv6. My proposed solution is simple: Configure a proxy server that serves IPv6 requests, passing those requests through to underlying IPv4-only servers that not have yet been transitioned to IPv6. This article describes how to configure Apache's proxy server to fill this role, and suggests a few ideas for use."

Comments

Re:Proxy server fun

[rincebrain]

Yes. An open proxy server on a topic just mentioned by /.

I can't imagine that's abusable. I mean, nobody would embed ads in their IPv6 proxy if it became too popular, right?

Just a thought.

Most people don't care about IPv6

[Anonymous Coward]

IPv6 was primarily designed to solve a *problem*.

That problem was IPv4 address space exhaustion.

If the problem isn't hurting people on either side (client or server), then there is no reason for them to migrate to IPv6.

For people in certain heavy net using countries (such as Japan and S. Korea) which have received a smaller slice of the IPv4 pie, then there is more incentive to move; for the vast bulk of the world there is very little incentive to move to IPv6.

Re:Most people don't care about IPv6

[tokachu(k)]

The problem exists just as much in the U.S. as it does anywhere else in the world. For example... Do you use NAT (a home router)? Blame your IPv4-based ISP for not having enough address space for you. Do you run a web-hosting company? You probably know how expensive address space is. Neither Japan nor South Korea had to use IPv6. They could've stuck IPv4 and NAT (something that rural broadband companies in the U.S. do, by the way), but they didn't. They chose to solve the problem rather than ignore it.

Reverse proxy servers always open

[jgarzik]

Silly people.

A reverse proxy server (http accelerator) must be open to the public.

However, that does not mean the server is an "open proxy"... the proxy configuration only proxies for the specific web sites listed in the configuration file.

Re:Not a Catch-22

[Bombcar]

I always thought that the way it worked was that if you were certified insane you couldn't fly, but the Catch-22 was that if you tried to get certified insane it proved that you didn't want to fly, which was an action of a sane man, therefore you had to fly. Nothing you could do would prevent you from flying.

Re:ISPs

[iabervon]

ISPs do provide IPv6 addresses for free when they provide IPv4 addresses. Every IPv4 address has a corresponding IPv6 address. One of the points of moving to a huge address space is that you can assign each old address a new address and not use up a significant portion of the new address space.

What would be interesting is if ISPs would assign a static IPv6 address to customers who have dynamic IPv4 addresses. If the ISP has IPv6 at all, they have a huge block of addresses, which they could trivially assign to their customers by account number. And then there would be people who would set up IPv6-only sites or sites where the IPv6 address was more reliable, because the address was free.

Re:Proxy server fun

[maxwell demon]

Bah, that's nothing. My proxy converts first posts on slashdot into insightful comments!