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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.'"
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.
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
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.)
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.