World IPv6 Day: Most-watched Tech Event Since Y2K

alphadogg wrote in with a fairly extreme bit of hyperbole saying "The nation's largest telecom carriers, content providers, hardware suppliers and software vendors will be on the edge of their seats today for World IPv6 Day, which is the most-anticipated 24 hours the tech industry has seen since fears of the Y2K bug dominated New Year's Eve in 1999. More than 400 organizations are participating in World IPv6 Day, a large-scale experiment aimed at identifying problems associated with IPv6, an upgrade to the Internet's main communications protocol, IPv4. Sponsored by the Internet Society, World IPv6 Day runs from 8 p.m. EST Tuesday until 7:59 p.m. EST Wednesday. The IT departments in the participating organizations have spent the last five months preparing their websites for an anticipated rise in IPv6-based traffic, more tech support calls and possible hacking attacks prompted by this largest-ever trial of IPv6."

Comments

Guess who's not taking part?

[squiggleslash]

Big names like Google are:

$ host www.google.com
www.google.com is an alias for www.l.google.com.
www.l.google.com has address 74.125.45.147
www.l.google.com has address 74.125.45.104
www.l.google.com has address 74.125.45.99
www.l.google.com has address 74.125.45.105
www.l.google.com has address 74.125.45.103
www.l.google.com has address 74.125.45.106
www.l.google.com has IPv6 address 2001:4860:800a::6a
$

But one tech website you'd expect to want to dabble in the new and good for some reason isn't:

$ host slashdot.org
slashdot.org has address 216.34.181.45
slashdot.org mail is handled by 10 mx.sourceforge.net.
$

Well, of course!

Re:Guess who's not taking part?

[Anonymous Coward]

They'll get around to it when they get to adding Unicode support. To be fair, Unicode is only 20 years old and IPv6 only 13 years old, so they aren't much later with these technologies than they are with their stories.

Re:Guess who's not taking part?

[squiggleslash]

In fairness, Unicode requires quite a bit of testing to make sure it works, even if you're using tools that, out of the box, should support Unicode transparently. In Slashdot's case, a legacy of building the site on what was considered top of the line in the 1990s has left them with a lot of things that can go wrong.

IPv6, on the other hand... well, if you're using virtual hosting (and /. is), all that it takes is to turn on IPv6 on the front facing server, give it an IP address (which could just be a 6to4 address), update DNS, and, well, it either works or it doesn't. A half competent sysadmin should be able to do all that in less than ten minutes. I say that, because I am a half competent sysadmin, and adding IPv6 to the websites I host (on a third party VPS no less) took just that. I enabled 6to4 on the VPS itself, assigned the 6to4 address, and added the DNS record. And everything "just worked". Took me less than 15 minutes.

I'd be very interested to know why CT hasn't done this.

How to get wide IPV6 adoption in months not years.

[IpSo_]

Have Google modify their page rank algorithm to give any website accessible through IPV6 a slight boost. The power they hold over website revenues is so huge the SEO industry would go nuts over this and you'll see adoption rates explode.