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Yahoo IPv6 Upgrade Could Shut Out 1M Users

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the trial-by-fire dept.

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.'"

14 of 290 comments (clear)

  1. Real question is... by Migala77 · · Score: 4, Funny

    Will Yahoo still have 1M users by year-end to shut out?

    1. Re:Real question is... by longacre · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Not sure how or why, but they still get a shit-ton of traffic and Yahoo Mail has 3x as many users as Gmail.

      --
      Airplane Photos, Airline News, Planespotting Guides
  2. killer app by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Once Yahoo! is only available over IPv6, the internet will have no choice but to upgrade!

  3. Great logic there Lou by OverlordQ · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.
    1. Re:Great logic there Lou by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.

    2. Re:Great logic there Lou by klapaucjusz · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I think you're missing the point.

      We're not speaking about switching to pure IPv6. We're speaking of making Yahoo accessible over both IPv4 and IPv6.

      Pure IPv4 ("legacy") sites will have no problem, they'll just contact Yahoo over IPv4. Properly configured dual-stack sites will have no problem, they'll have a choice between IPv4 and IPv6. It's only mis-configured clients that might have problems.

      The article claims that 0.05% of Yahoo's customers are mis-configured. These 0.05% will need to either disable IPv6, or fix their systems. --jch

  4. IPv6 "brokenness" =/= lack of IPv4 support by clone5342! · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

    1. Re:IPv6 "brokenness" =/= lack of IPv4 support by WidgetGuy · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

      You are correct. I believe it's called "running a dual stack."

      If slashdotters want to test whether their present system (client, router, NAT, firewall, proxy, ISP) is IPv6-ready, go here. Its free and there s a ton of good information about the conversion "issues" and what you'll need to do to become a full IPv6 citizen.

      --
      One "Aw, Shit!" is worth 100 "Ata boys!"
    2. Re:IPv6 "brokenness" =/= lack of IPv4 support by IAN · · Score: 3, Interesting

      [...] 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.

  5. Yahoo mail by Issildur03 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  6. Re:Yahoo IPv6 Upgrade Could Shut Out 1M Users ... by MozeeToby · · Score: 3, Funny

    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.

  7. Why? by Yvan256 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Is there some operating systems out there which still aren't compatible with IPv6, or is it a problem at the ISPs level?

  8. A German website tried this by Casandro · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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

  9. Yahoo! is relying on old, incomplete data. by Above · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.