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The Night the IETF Shut Off IPv4

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the fun-with-switches dept.

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.'"

19 of 208 comments (clear)

  1. Hardcore Torrents by rrkap · · Score: 5, Funny

    I'm glad to know that the internet will still be able to fulfill its primary purpose as a porn distribution channel when we switch over to ipv6.

    --
    I like my beverages with warning labels!
    1. Re:Hardcore Torrents by Sique · · Score: 5, Funny

      What did you expect from IPvSex?

      --
      .sig: Sique *sigh*
  2. Yeah, that's great but... by Reality+Master+201 · · Score: 5, Funny

    More about the hardcore torrents, please.

    1. Re:Yeah, that's great but... by Supergibbs · · Score: 5, Funny

      This thread is useless without pictures.

      --
      First post! (just in case I am...)
    2. Re:Yeah, that's great but... by Revotron · · Score: 5, Funny

      I only read /. for the articles... honest...

  3. Okay... by TFer_Atvar · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Who else put ipv6.google.com in their address bar just to see what would happen?

    1. Re:Okay... by damn_registrars · · Score: 5, Funny

      "Natalie Portman + Linux" (+1)
      I think you probably lose another geek point for bad syntax on that one. You likely wanted

      "Natalie Portman" + Linux

      Instead. We'll take your card at the door...
      --
      Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
    2. Re:Okay... by plague3106 · · Score: 5, Funny

      Me too, but I got redirected to a google search for ipv6.google.com.

    3. Re:Okay... by mobilesteve · · Score: 5, Informative

      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/

    4. Re:Okay... by Sesse · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.)
    5. Re:Okay... by merreborn · · Score: 5, Funny

      I did, the google logo does a little dance, other than that it just looks like google.
      The logo can also be seen with IPv4: http://www.google.com/images/ipv6_logo.gif
      Wow, is all of the IPv6 internet this much cooler than the regular old, boring IPv4 internet? No one told me IPv6 animates corporate logos! WHY HAVEN'T WE MIGRATED YET?
    6. Re:Okay... by Hogwash+McFly · · Score: 5, Funny

      I got redirected to a Cool Web Search for ipv6.google.com. Also, the words 'redirected' and 'google' in your post are hyperlinks underlined in green that give me search results for 'redirected' and 'google' in my area. There are also many informative pop-up windows offering services ranging from pornography to tiny wireless cameras.

      --
      Mother, do you think they'll like this sig?
    7. Re:Okay... by More_Cowbell · · Score: 5, Funny
      Just GREAT. Now you guys have gone and broke the interwebs. This page is now the #1 hit for "Natalie Portman" + Linux

      http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=Natalie+Portman+%2BLinux&btnG=Search

      --
      Experience teaches only the teachable. -AH
    8. Re:Okay... by junglee_iitk · · Score: 5, Informative

      No! I bet you are using Firefox. Just Ctrl+Shift+R (hard reload) again and see the dance :)

    9. Re:Okay... by fyonn · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

  4. I was there by Zarhan · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  5. Finding things in IPv6 Cyberspace... by tlambert · · Score: 5, Funny

    Finding things in IPv6 Cyberspace...

    "So what's the Gregorian music website?"

    It's the little azure ball to the south of the stepped scarlet pyramid of the Eastern Seaboard Fission Authority burning beyond the green cubes of Mitsubishi Bank of America.

    I highly recommend using an Ono-Sendai Cyberspace 7 computer deck.

    Stay away from Sense/Net if you're a n00b, or you're likely to get iced.

    -- Terry

  6. Slashdot is not available over IPv6 by Gud · · Score: 5, Informative

    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

  7. I'm going to start my own internet! by MK_CSGuy · · Score: 5, Funny

    With blackjack, and hookers!