Slashdot Mirror
Yahoo IPv6 Upgrade Could Shut Out 1M Users
alphadogg writes "Yahoo is forging ahead with a move to IPv6 on its main Web site by year-end despite worries that up to 1 million Internet users may be unable to access it initially. Yahoo's massive engineering effort to support IPv6 — the long-anticipated upgrade to the Internet's main communications protocol — could at first shut out potential www.yahoo.com users due to what the company and others call 'IPv6 brokenness.'"
So 1000000 users can't view Yahoo's Web server...
And nothing of value was lost.
Will Yahoo still have 1M users by year-end to shut out?
Once Yahoo! is only available over IPv6, the internet will have no choice but to upgrade!
I really cant recall the last time myself or anyone I know accessed Yahoo. Are they really still relevant?
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
From
IPv6 experts say some Internet users will experience slowdowns or have trouble connecting to IPv6-enabled Web sites because they have misconfigured or misbehaving network equipment
to
"IPv6 brokenness."
So I should blame the water company if I install my plumbing wrong?
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
But how will people access that completely useless and tremendously jumbled index page-o-5,000,000 links?
That isn't what they're doing (yet). Although the headline/summary made it sound like they were shutting out IPv4 users, this is not the case. They will be supporting both simultaneously.
What that means is that if a website advertises itself as simultaneously IPv4/IPv6 compliant, and someone's computer/browser thinks they are IPv6 compliant but their attempts to connect via IPv6 don't make it through (ISP? router? modem? who knows), their connection times out and the site is unreachable.
The solution in this case would be to identify the node that doesn't support IPv6 (might be difficult) or force the system on the user-end to use IPv4 (shouldn't be that hard). It certainly shouldn't be the end of the world, and it shouldn't really even affect too many people. And it will be a push to at least support IPv6 (not necessarily require it) at every step of the path so that users whose computers are capable of IPv6 connections can actually connect successfully over it.
Yahoo has been one of the most vocal Internet companies to express concern about industry estimates that 0.05% of Internet users will be unable to access Web sites that support both IPv6 and the current standard, IPv4.
So 0.05% of the internet won't be able to access Yahoo. What % of that actually WANT access to it? In this case, it really is "very little" of value was lost.
Yahoo mail has a nice tab-based interface so you can open multiple emails while writing a few more, which Gmail is missing. It's also hard to migrate 10 years' of emails to a new service (they make it hard, at least) - not to mention getting everyone to use your new email address.
It's not even a shutout from what I understand. The IPv6 request will timeout after a while and revert to IPv4, so while people will certainly experience slowdowns, I doubt anyone will be actually unable to access the site. Detect this and point people to resources to resolve the problem and things will take care of themselves. And by things taking care of themselves I mean that you will be asked to go fix the internet by your parents, grandparents, siblings, aunts, uncles, friends, friends-who-are-only-friends-when-there's-a-computer-problem, and your grandma's bridge partner who you once installed a printer for.
Honestly, if it weren't for the army of computer geeks fixing most of the IT problems for friends and family I think the whole thing would collapse overnight.
Is there some operating systems out there which still aren't compatible with IPv6, or is it a problem at the ISPs level?
I suspect Netscape ISP is still using the old V4 addresses. No more downloading of TV shows I missed (like Judge Napolitano's Freedom Watch, Conan O'brien, Rachel Maddow, et cetera). Oh well. I'll cancel the netscape and get VirginMobile's wireless deal..... although it is 5 times more expensive.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
I feel bad for that 1M, kind of, but any change you make will shut out at least that many with setups that are broken in other ways. I bet there are more than 1M people still on Netscape 4, but I'll be darned if I'll take them into account when planning service or network upgrades.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
yet another article that's skeptical of how ready IPv6 is. The amount of brokenness that is there is not very big. Of all the people that have the full Internet (that is IPv4 *and* IPv6) most will simply connect to any IPv6 website without issues.
And apart from the fact that yahoo seems to be a US only thing, and even there is not so relevant anymore, I applaud them doing IPv6, when they get to it. (and after Google, Comcast, Akamai and many others)
I wish we'd get over this "brokenness" story and simply deploy and then fix it for the 1% that has issues. Would be nice if it gets rolled out to the point of 20% traffic in 2011, the year we'll run out of available IPv4 addresses.
Yahoo still has a lot of good stuff. Mail and calendar work well, there is useful news and finance pages as well. I was playing around with their YUI stuff yesterday, and it is pretty cool and open source.
Sites should probably serve ipv6 from a separate colo to a separate domain name to work the kinks out first, e.g. yahoov6.com. After a testing period they could start moving the support over, assuming the results were good.
#6495ED - cornflower blue
They are the email host for AT&T. If you use an AT&T company as your ISP, your SMTP and POP servers are hosted by yahoo.
IIRC the problem isn't with computers that don't support IPv6. It's with networks where the computers and DNS software does support IPv6 but there's no IPv6 connectivity. In those cases a name query gets back AAAA records, the computer tries to connect via IPv6, and the connection doesn't go through because IPv6 traffic doesn't have a route off the local network. If your computers don't support IPv6 at all, the problem doesn't happen (the AAAA records never get used). If the DNS software (probably in your router) doesn't support IPv6, it won't do queries for AAAA records in the first place. Note also that at the other end (the DNS servers for the web site's domain) there should also be filtering in place: AAAA records shouldn't be being returned in queries that came in via IPv4. But not all sites do that filtering, so clients have to be prepared to get IPv6-only data back in IPv4 responses and filter it out.
Probably the best way to solve this: If the largest sites on the internet were able to do brief periods (at different times) where they were only accessible on IPv6.
Sure, it may suck for some people if they are unable to access Yahoo.com or Youtube.com for 30 minutes once every two weeks. It may be the most important 30 minutes of their life. But at least it would tell people with very loud letters 'SOMETHING ON YOUR END IS BROKEN'. Then word of mouth will quickly get around whether it is the ISP or their networking gear.
I think (and hope) the first site to do this would be hailed as doing something brave and constructive.
They had their servers respond to both IPv4 and IPv6 on the same domain name for a day. Among one million visitors they only had 5 with a problem. 2 could be solved by rebooting the router and or the computer, 2 had unreleated problems with their internet, and one actually had triggered a bug in the OS.
http://www.heise.de/netze/meldung/IPv6-Tag-bei-heise-de-Erste-Ergebnisse-1081201.html
People (and ISPs) are never going to switch to IPv6 if it does not affect them directly. If a major website, such as Yahoo, makes the move, then the ISPs will be forced to update, or loose customers. If only Youtube and Facebook would follow suit....
First, it's not really IPv6 brokenness so much as it is an issue with hosts that think they have IPv6 connectivity, but, really don't.
Second, in most cases, affected users will see long page load times, not complete inability to access the site.
The 0.05% number is probably pretty accurate. Several sites have used embedded tests to measure this and come to the same number. However, the good news is that a year ago, this was 0.1% and it is continuing to trend downward.
With IANA running out of IPv4 this month, it's not surprising that Yahoo is moving forward. It's disturbing that so many others appear not to be.
I've been trying to make a Gmail account for the past year. Each time it asks for my phone number, and I say I don't have one (which I seriously don't). It says they'll get back to me, and they never do.
Yahoo never required a phone number, so guess which service I use?
So 1000000 users can't view Yahoo's Web server...
And nothing of value was lost.
If you had a clue how lame it looks when you write a comment like that about Yahoo.
It may be valueless for you and me but for people making it one of top 10 sites on global market and number 1 in markets like Japan, it does have a value.
One has to be really disconnected from general public to post a comment about a top 10 www site like that.
From
IPv6 experts say some Internet users will experience slowdowns or have trouble connecting to IPv6-enabled Web sites because they have misconfigured or misbehaving network equipment
to
"IPv6 brokenness."
So I should blame the water company if I install my plumbing wrong?
As you give plumbing as example, I feel free to give an example from TV World.
Color TV was a success because TV stations didn't have to bother with BW TV sets. Some analogue genius trick allowed BW sets to keep receiving color and display in black and white. So, people weren't forced to replace their sets.
Same goes for FM radio/Stereo. A mono FM receiver can receive and play stereo FM station even if it includes data such as RDS.
One of the reasons why 3D TV will stay some kind of fantasy? Basically, you can't air 3D TV station or data without displaying like a mess on ordinary 2D TV making it useless for 99%.
Perhaps, IPV6 could have better backward compatibility with IPV4 and such stories wouldn't appear at all.
Specifically, couldn't they have some javascript load a one line javascript file from a subdomain with their desired configuration, and just report the time from the script element being added to the script being executed?
Yahoo! has been talking about this at conferences for a while, but I'm not sure they are using good data. Here's a lighting talk from NANOG about it:
http://www.nanog.org/meetings/nanog46/presentations/Tuesday/Igor_ipv6_recursive_light_N46.pdf
Page 2 has the crux of the issue, Yahoo! claims if you add AAAA records that 0.078% of the user base "breaks", that is they understand a AAAA enough to try IPv6, but they lack IPv6 connectivity to the destination.
There was a time this made sense. A lot of early IPv6 deployments were islands without complete connectivity. Additionally, up until about 18 months ago there was a serious lack of IPv6 interconnectivity between ISPs, they were still figuring out how to turn up peering, filter, and so on.
However, times change. ISP's are now fairly well interconnected, and getting a lot better every day. Almost no one turns up IPv6 as an island anymore. Interestingly, some of the original islands still exist, on purpose, as they are test labs or other non-production deployments. The people use them expect them to be broken in some ways, in some cases to test what the user experience is when various things break. Indeed, I suspect the number of islands is small, and constant, and thus an ever decreasing percentage of the IPv6 user base.
Another large issue with the numbers is that they are only measuring the difference between the status quo and one of the four outcomes. A user could have:
A) Broken IPv4, Broken IPv6.
B) Broken IPv4, Working IPv6.
C) Working IPv4, Broken IPv6.
D) Working IPv4, Working IPv6.
What Yahoo has done is measure the status quo (IPv4 only) to bullet point C.
However, there will be some folks in bullet B. These are folks who can't get to Yahoo! today at all, but would be able to if Yahoo! had AAAA's. Granted, it's probably smaller, but still is an offset. Basically they are trying to scare folks that 470k folks might not be able to access Yahoo with IPv6. However, 470k folks may already be unable to access it via IPv4, they just can't measure that right now because they never see the requests!
There is also the looming issue. As a we run out of IPv4 addresses (likely in late 2011) ISP's will basically be forced to turn up IPv6 only users. Even if you take Yahoo!'s numbers as correct, that 0.078% are broken, then all you would need is a larger percentage than that of the user base to be IPv6 ONLY and it makes more sense to have AAAA's and exclude them. Basically 1% deployment of IPv6 completely flips their argument if the goal is serving the largest number of folks.
My take, some folks inside Yahoo! collected some rather raw data early on in IPv6's life cycle. Folks from Marketing and such read too much into it, and went into a panic that some large number of users wouldn't be abel to get to Yahoo! This created a huge issue for the engineers trying to deploy IPv6, which they have been fighting ever since.
I think it probably comes down to this (or similar):
What's your consumer target? Can you reach it? Is the change economically worth it in terms of your target?
"Science can amuse and fascinate us all, but it is engineering that changes the world. " - Asimov.
The summary and to some extent TFA spout off with some FUD ("1M Internet users" not Yahoo users. "potential yahoo.com users" and some other details). I love how the summary says "at first 1M people could be shut out" but doesn't really finish the thought. "at first nobody used computers" ... and then what, the world exploded into hot dogs? dogs started using them? when starting a sentence with "at first" it makes sense to finish the thought instead of leave people hanging with some FUDish thoughts.
The article overall does a decent job of explaining the causes of this initial IPv6 brokenness, but I'm not crazy about how TFA and summary need to exclaim about 1M Internet users in order to draw attention.
Unfortunately, ISPs will still only give you one IPv6 address, so that they can try to charge for additional IP addresses.
NAT will survive IPv6.
So the next set of problems with IPV6 will be a monstrous segment of the user level internet.
The problem is all the 2Wire Residential Gateways that provide phone, TV and of course Internet AND COMCAST's cable boxes ( typically a Motorola device). Given that COMCAST just got permission to swallow up a whole boatload of the cable business it will be even more complex with even a more diverse ecosystem devices.
Besides being broken out of the box ( You cannot have more then 1 IP Address per machine, and don't talk to me about MAC spoofing ) these things are just clamped down to the extent that you cannot really change how they work. They were designed to handle your basic home network and nothing else, eg: DHCP plug-n-Play. There are millions of these boxes and I doubt a simple firmware fix will solve the problem unless they replace the entire OS in the box and I can just see that being and EPIC fail.
Others have mentioned they are doing 4 to 6 tunneling. Well that is great if you know how to set it up. 99.99995% of AT&T's or Comcasts customers will not and to even attempt to explain it to them will be a pointless endeavor since they do not even grasp the notion of IP addressing to begin with so that is really a non-starter.
Regardless of the collective opinions of Yahoo this is the tip of the iceberg and it is a big one and the collective generic mom and pop internet users are the Titanic steaming full speed ahead directly at it.
These simply just add more issues onto the pile of the already unsolved issues with IPV6.
I have said this before and I still believe the best course of action is to simply scrap IPV6 and take IPV4 and simply change the segment size from BYTES to WORDS. Right now we have 254 Class A networks and just going from BYTES to WORDS will give us 65535 CLASS A Networks and that gives us 65281 class A networks to hand out with each one having 281,474,976,710,655 (FFFF.FFFF.FFFF ) unique addresses, except we do it wisely this time instead of doing things like giving a single university and entire class A.
There is a rough estimate of about 4000 ISP in the US and most of those get their address blocks from the really BIG ones, AT&T, Verizon, COMCAST and some others. So if the world wide number of ISP's were say 20,000 we would still have 40,000 or so unused CLASS A networks.
Can anyone seriously really see a day when we will have more then 65535 ISP's? I do not believe this to be true unless ( and I really really doubt it ) the trend of bigger ISP's swallowing smaller ISP's changes
Hey KID! Yeah you, get the fuck off my lawn!
I've just assumed that IPv6 is somebody else's issue to deal with. In theory my OS (XP) supports it but that's all I know. Is there a way of pointing my browser somewhere to find out if everything 'at my end' and my ISP connection is fully functional?
Subject says everything.
I sure hope no one is relying on 1500 byte MTU paths. As I recall, the most anyone can rely on is 576.
Many QoS setups mess with MTU and so does VPN of various kinds.
So I should blame the water company if I install my plumbing wrong?
No you should blame your plumber if they install your plumbing wrong. You should blame the water company if they install the plumbing service connecting to your house wrong. Unless you are in fact the plumber, it's not your fault.
Also last I checked your water service didn't change the size and standards of pipes every couple of decades.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Well..we don't need all those obsolete users! :)
Windows Server 2008 R2. Not that IPv6 implementation itself is wrong - its just everything else surrounding it: from dcpromo to the evil Network and Sharing Center and bloody stupid restricted control of firewall profiles.
Most MS technet comments just end up recommending disabling ipv6 as 'the solution'.
Result: hell'va load of windows servers on the web with just ipv4 soon...
www.tribalnetworks.org - helping tribal people around the world to own their own means of high-tech communications
Redundant? Really? Mods, have you no sense of humor?
Yahoo users are misconfigured. There is a lot of people disabling/removing IPv6 from their machines right now. Particularly on Windows 7 machines.
Careful what we wish for!
All those Yahoo users will just be injected into the Google and Bing bloodstreams. Haven't you noticed that when a website fails on modern browsers and people get tired of refreshing, they just move on to the search widget right next to the URL bar? What's the default search engine on those? How many people use search bar daily because they have no idea what the URL bar to its left does?
What about at&t DSL and IPv6? where are the ipv6 dsl modems? and what about all the routers that don't even have IPv6 how many will get IPv6 firmware updates?
Or it could mean that since Yahoo Mail alone has 300M registered users (never mind their other services) then 1M having a problem is statistically insignificant.
You know one of the worst managed thing at a ISP/Company after DNS? Mail servers. Ask spammers how they are still being able to do business at this age.
They are generally outdated. Now one wonders, if the outdated/misconfigured servers fail to do anything at yahoo.com domain and they start retrying (just like any smtp server), what would happen?
As long as FreeBSD doesn't die, they should.
(Yahoo! runs FreeBSD on their web frontend servers and for backend operations, last I heard.)
Isn't there something a bit 'iffy' in terms of the quality of the KAME reference implementation that FreeBSD uses for it's IPv6 stack? I seem to recall reading something about it not being quite 'complete' or stable, but that may have been in the context of something else.
As far as I know, Yahoo uses both FreeBSD and PHP whenever available and they made huge contributions to both projects, in terms of money too. On the other hand, Apple isn't even listed in FreeBSD contributor companies.
You see the great, thankful feedback they get from /. community :)
> where are the ipv6 dsl modems?
You mean routers. Modems don't deal with IP at all. Unfortunately most DSL modems include really crappy routers which most consumers use instead of the real thing.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Well to be honest, the Linksys and Netgear routers are also pretty crappy in reality. (But are still much better than the (usually artificially limited) crap included in most DSL and DOCSIS modems).
The Linksys and Netgear (and other similar routers) are with few exceptions underpowered, and have limited configurability with the stock firmware. (Of course the non-stack firmwares like DD-WRT can still be somewhat hit or miss depending on exactly which device you have and which features you are interested in.
Stylish sheet to fix many problems in Slashdot's D3: https://gist.github.com/801524
s/non-stack/non-stock/
Stylish sheet to fix many problems in Slashdot's D3: https://gist.github.com/801524
if MS was willing to do the right thing, I am guessing that Google would go along with it. At that point, users all over will scream to their ISP's that they want IPV6.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
... 1 million internet users need to upgrade their shit if they want to keep a working network connection.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
I went to ds.test-ipv6.com and was amazed by the clarity of explanations of the various tests. It gave me a technical result and a 'what that result means to you' which I could understand.
Yahoo! mail is the back-end provider of mail for all Rogers internet customers in Canada, and also their default home page.
That alone accounts for 2 million or more homes according to stats I just googled.
I don't know if they are also the back-end provider for any US or EU ISPs but if they are then that is significant. I think they are... they inherited everyone who was an "@Home" ISP back in the day.
I really pity them for helping PHP and FreeBSD projects if they have that kind of feedback from so called open source community.
What they should do is, cut the crap and move to MS .NET so MS may have a single credible prestigious "demo" in hand.
Speaking directly from TV World, there isn't such a bandwidth to duplicate channels. H264 has become such a hit because it does amazing amount of bandwidth savings compared to MPEG4-SP or MPEG2.
There can't be (without huge costs) a situation like top 16 mainstream channels airing in 2 bands, one in 2D, one in 3D.
If there were a standard in MPEG spec like 3D bits ignored by 2D receivers, just like analogue b&w/colour situation, things would be really different of course.
On my DVR Box,there are 4 movies consisting of 24 GB which I can't watch without buying an 3D TV from "LG". For me, it is waste of space. This is the issue I talk about. Of course, they just spend 7-8 hours of "3rd tuner" and my electricity to put them there. If we speak about actual, live TV on satellite, things really get ugly.