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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.'"
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.
Is there some operating systems out there which still aren't compatible with IPv6, or is it a problem at the ISPs level?
No, but if they changed their infrastructure to no longer be compatible with your existing (and working) plumbing and expected you to pay to upgrade, you'd be mad, right?
This is actually a pretty good analogy. Suppose the city was upgrading to higher pressure water in order to be able to reach further (yeah I know doesn't really work that way). So about 20 years ago the city started telling everyone they were going to switch over and if you have antique, clay pipes in your home, you'll need to make sure your main intake valve handles things correctly or it could jam and cause problems. So, having bought a new intake valve within the last decade (and really who hasn't bought a new router or leased one within that time frame) you might want to make sure it supports the new standard, or just wait to see if you have problems. And if you do have problems, yeah you might be mad. If you're rational, you'll be mad at the people who sold you the intake valve, but you might be mad at the city too.
That's progress I suppose.
I must confess, except for a bigger address space, I'm not sure what benefit IPv6 has for *me*
It has a bigger address space. Yup you nailed it. That's the big difference. That means networks stop being so tiered and problematic and each device you own can have a number of unique addresses, enabling a whole range of new technology cheaply and affordably. You don't want new networking technologies and such? Well that's just fine, but you'll have to excuse the rest of us when we ignore your complaints.
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
[...] 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.
More precisely: if the DNS has both v6 (AAAA) and v4 (A) records for the site's name, and the client prefers v6 connectivity over v4, and a v6 connection can't be established for some reason, the site will appear to be broken. Most large sites have measured this kind of brokenness, but haven't published their methodology nor results; there is an exception, but it's limited to Scandinavian users. It is nevertheless a very interesting analysis, which basically suggests that eliminating just two sources of brokenness (OS X < 10.6.5 and Opera < 10.50) would practically eliminate client loss.