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The Night the IETF Shut Off IPv4
IP Freely writes "At this year's Internet Engineering Task Force meeting in Philadelphia, conference organizers shut off IPv4 for an hour. Surprisingly, chaos did not ensue. 'After everyone got his or her system up and running, many people started looking for IPv6-reachable web sites, reporting those over Jabber instant messaging — which posed its own challenges in the IPv6 department. I was surprised at the number of sites and wide range of content available over IPv6. Apart from — obviously — IPv6-related sites; they ranged from "the largest Gregorian music collection in Internet" to "hardcore torrents." Virtually none of the better known web destinations were reachable over IPv6. That changed when ipv6.google.com popped into existence.'"
I did, the google logo does a little dance, other than that it just looks like google.
I guess I was expecting too much, but the sites that are indexed appear to be just the regular ipv4 sites, so they have ipv6 enabled the web frontend to the search engine but not the back end that goes and crawls the web.
I am a lawyer and this constitutes legal advice and I shall indemnify you against any losses arising from taking it.
And really, only problems I saw were the fact that it's pain in the ass to get automatic DHCPv6 working. The idea is that IPv6 stateless autoconfig (router advertisement) has a bit that tells the client if they should get ALL config via DHCP or just additional (like DNS addresses). However, no easy way to make Linux kernel execute DHCPv6 client based on the received stateless autoconfig bit.
Anyway, after statically configuring DNS servers, things were very smooth. Google et al worked, I could access entire IPv4 web via sixxs.org (just go http://slashdot.org.sixxs.org/ to access Slashdot via IPv6), I could SSH to my home servers...only things that seemed a bit odd were failing reverse DNSes on some hops when running traceroute. Jabber worked, IRC worked.
Great experience and experiment.
That's the point. It's IPv6 only:
$ dig ipv6.google.com aaaa
;; QUESTION SECTION:
;ipv6.google.com. IN AAAA
;; ANSWER SECTION:
ipv6.google.com. 10792 IN CNAME ipv6.l.google.com.
ipv6.l.google.com. 5 IN AAAA 2001:4860:0:2001::68
ipv6.l.google.com. 5 IN AAAA 2001:4860:0:1001::68
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
TA typo'd Georgian into Gregorian.
http://music.inet.ge/
Sixxs.net lists some IPv6 web sites in its Wiki:
http://www.sixxs.net/wiki/Category:IPv6-specific_content
and there is also some other 'Cool IPv6 stuff' listed on the Sixxs web site:
http://www.sixxs.net/misc/coolstuff/
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
If you really want to see what Google's IPv6 page looks like, you can use SixXs's IPv6 to IPv4 looking glass: http://ipv6.google.com.ipv4.sixxs.org/
Someone should fix that and the traffic would have gone back up to normal load :-)
Here is my list of sites that I was able to reach using native IPv6
using IE worked:
ipv6.google.com
www.ripe.net
www.apnic.net
www.stupi.net
www.arin.net
www.icann.org
www.nlnetlabs.nl
Failed foillowing sites did not work
www.cisco.net/com
www.microsoft.com
www.speakeasy.net
slashdot.org
news.bbc.co.uk
www.mbl.is
www.cnn.com
www.comcast.com/net
news.com.com
www.ibm.com
One of the things the zeroconf and autoconf folks keep missing is that large organizations (like where I am) need to know which host had a given IP at a given time in the past. We need records and accounting, basically. While DHCP isn't perfect, by any stretch, a fully-autoconf (or zeroconf) network doesn't fill that need, and would be an absolute nightmare for the security folks.
For example, if I get a complaint about a laptop a few days after the event, how am I supposed to find that host once it's moved onto another network? Are people seriously saying I should have to walk every single router neighbor table (or arp table, if we're talking v4) looking for a specific 64-bit number? The network I work on has literally thousands of routers & switches. That's simply a non-starter. With DHCP, I at least have a > 50% chance of finding the MAC of a host (and where it is now) with a simple query.
In short, business needs are driving it. Almost every discussion I've seen of IPv6 for large enterprises (not ISPs) has assumed that DHCPv6 will be used, and that autoconf + zeroconf will not.
Hi. I work (among other things) with IPv6 in Google, although I was only distantly released to this launch (some of my code was used in the monitoring components). It's nice to see we're getting attention :-)
You're entirely right that at the moment, only web search has an AAAA record. (However, with some trickery, you can get several other Google services running too -- just add /etc/hosts lines to the same IP, and you'll probably be able to run Maps, GMail and several others over IPv6.) We don't yet crawl, send or receive e-mail, or support GTalk over IPv6, and we definitely cannot guarantee anything about the uptime of the IPv6 versions of our services. (We've had a few years to make a production-grade IPv4 network, give us some time to make it IPv6-ready too!) Think of it as the first baby step; although we don't have a roadmap published (we almost never talk about future products in Google) I think it's pretty safe to say that there will be more.
Whether there should be services that are not available over IPv4, though, is an entirely different discussion. If you had a cool service and could offer it to the world, would you keep it away from 99.9% of the Internet just because you could?
/* Steinar */
- Software engineer, Google Norway
(This comment is of course GPLed.)
Pretty much no home routers support ipv6.
Basically you can either buy a cisco and upgrade to an ISP that'll route ipv6 (that's the neatest way of doing it, but is expensive and limits your ISP choice), or if you can get hold of an old WRT54G you can install a custom firmware that supports ipv6 and create a tunnel to a tunnel broker somewhere - it'll be much slower (tunnel latency is typically 300ms+ for the first hop because there are so few of them) but you'll be 'on' the ipv6 internet.
No! I bet you are using Firefox. Just Ctrl+Shift+R (hard reload) again and see the dance :)
or you can use an apple airport extreme router which supports ipv6 out of the box, though you might need to turn the "firewall" off to get the full functionality.
A lot of people think they need their ISP's help to get IPv6 connectivity. That's not the case. If you're running Windows Vista, or if you use an Apple Airport router, you should get connectivity to the IPv6 Internet out of the box. If you're running Linux, I've writtent a short HOWTO about IPv6 under Linux.