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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.'"
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!
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.
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 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.
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
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.