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

Fingers crossed

[elrous0]

I haven't gotten much use my well-stocked bomb shelter since Y2K. Sure, religious types keep predicting the end of the world, and guessing wrong every time. And bad predictions aren't going to justify the money I've put into this goddamn thing. Did you know that a generator's gaskets will dry-rot over time, even if you don't use it? Well guess what, they will--and that shit is expensive to fix too.

Man, if only we could have one nuclear war. Then the neighbors might finally stop laughing at me.

Re:Fingers crossed

[Kjella]

If we really went to all out nuclear war, you might be better off just biting the bullet. What would happen afterwards is a massive temperature drop, worse than the last ice age.

A global average surface cooling of -7C to -8C persists for years, and after a decade the cooling is still -4C (Fig. 2). Considering that the global average cooling at the depth of the last ice age 18,000 yr ago was about -5C, this would be a climate change unprecedented in speed and amplitude in the history of the human race. The temperature changes are largest over land ... Cooling of more than -20C occurs over large areas of North America and of more than -30C over much of Eurasia, including all agricultural regions.

-20C is enough to turn Florida into Alaska, one thing is that people can live in Alaska temperatures but the world's food supply would utterly collapse. Billions would likely die of starvation or freeze to death, not war.

Re:Fingers crossed

[elrous0]

I don't think you appreciate the vast amount of canned peaches I have at my disposal.

Re:Fingers crossed

[drinkypoo]

Polyurethane bushings squeak a lot, and automotive consumers care way too much about reductions in noise, vibration, and harshness, to the point where every car carries around hundreds of pounds of needless sound-deadening material.

Polyurethane bushings greased with the proper kind of grease really do not squeak. Further, when the bushing is permanently affixed to a sleeve as are the polyurethane bushings I installed at the pivots of the Dana 50 TTB in the front of my 1992 F250 7.3 4x4, that connection will squeak even less. I ripped most of the asphalt (except from the toe pan, but yes from the floor) and all of the interior out of my 1989 Nissan 240SX — yes, it got hot in there — and I couldn't hear the poly bushings at all even with the silencer in the "fancy" (cheap on eBay, though) exhaust, which brought it down pretty much to stock levels since I had no header. But then, they came with the proper grease and I used it.

If vehicles are designed to take a poly bush with a metal sleeve then this is a non-issue. And using hollow poly bushings provides superior ride to silicone-filled rubber in every way as they are more consistent. This actually has the effect of improving ride quality under the hands of competent engineers, because they may tighten up the suspension design and do the damping in the shock absorbers where it belongs. Then all you have to do is drop the typical OE Tokico crap for some Bilsteins or similar...

Re:Fingers crossed

[Eunuchswear]

Incidentally, anybody not stockpiling food right now is going to either be hungry or poorer by next year.

Start the hoarding now to bring on the collapse earlier.

Let the panic buying commence!

Re:Fingers crossed

[ilsaloving]

Now I know how my non-technical friends feel when I start going on about network topology or the benefits of proper normal form in a database.

Re:Fingers crossed

[lytithwyn]

Did you know that a generator's gaskets will dry-rot over time, even if you don't use it? Well guess what, they will--and that shit is expensive to fix too.

They dry rot especially if you don't use it. By running the generator fuel/oil (depending on which gasket) are splashed/pushed onto the gasket, moisturizing it and prolonging it's life. Crank it up every now and again and be sure to use fuel stabilizer if you don't drain the gas tank; otherwise the gas turns sort of green and rotten.

Re:Fingers crossed

[drinkypoo]

Just imagine how I feel when people try to make car analogies.

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?

[sakdoctor]

Dabble in the new? Slashdot can't even deploy Ajax correctly.
Slashdot still has its place, but it's definitely a 'legacy' website.

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.

Re:Guess who's not taking part?

[SockPuppetOfTheWeek]

The real reason Unicode isn't supported is because we'd have too much Zalgo spam on Slashdot if it was. (Well, that, and the control characters problem that Mike mentioned. The real Mike, not the fake one.)

Re:Guess who's not taking part?

[magamiako1]

Of course, the egg-heads have figured it out.

It's called IPv6 Privacy Extensions. Look it up.

Re:Guess who's not taking part?

[hitmark]

something like this? http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc4941.html

Hardly the most-anticipated 24 hours

[Ruvim]

This event had been very unpublicized for this to be the most-anticipated 24 hours in tech industry for the last 10 years.

Slashdot has no AAAA address

[simoncpu was here]

I was happy to see xkcd, Google, Yahoo, Facebook, and Plurk turn on their IPv6 capabilities, but I was quite sad that Slashdot didn't take part in the World IPv6 Day.

Re:And...

[bmo]

The only reason why Y2K /wasn't/ a disaster was because people worked their asses off for it to not happen.

Idiots everywhere...

--
BMO

So whatever happened to IPv5?

[SpryGuy]

That's my question.

Re:So whatever happened to IPv5?

[RazzleFrog]

Odd numbers are development releases - duh. Only even numbers are for stable releases.

Re:So whatever happened to IPv5?

[Laser_47]

IPv5 was originally designed as a streaming protocol, but they abandoned it now that everything is encapsulated in HTTP.

Re:So whatever happened to IPv5?

[fedux]

ST2 distinguishes its own packets with an Internet Protocol version number 5, although it was never known as IPv5.

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Stream_Protocol

Funny/interesting addresses

[Sinus0idal]

I've seen a few already today!

www.facebook.com has IPv6 address 2620:0:1c18:0:face:b00c::
cisco.v6day.akadns.net has IPv6 address 2001:420:80:1:c:15c0:d06:f00d
www.luns.net.uk has IPv6 address 2a01:8900:0:1::b00b:1e5
www.bbc.net.uk has IPv6 address 2001:4b10:bbc::1

Does v6 kick off 'IP addresses as a marketing tool'? :)

Re:Funny/interesting addresses

[petermgreen]

4b10 is allocated to RIPE - see here

Yes it is allocated to RIPE as part of the much larger block 2001:4A00::/23.

So RIPE apparently gave BBC 2001:4b10:bbc::/48

I see no evidence to back up this claim, whois clearly states that 2001:4b10::/32 is allocated to bogons limited. The allocation below that is not registered in whois but it seems most likely that bogons limited gave the BBC 2001:4b10:bbc::/48

But this time, the IETF is pretty conservative about how it's distributed the addresses

I've heard the opposite, for example free.fr got a /26 (64 times larger than the default ISP allocation of a /32) to support the highly address space inefficiant technology (at least in the form free deployed it in) known as 6rd.

http://ripe58.ripe.net/content/presentations/ipv6-free.pdf

only 2001::/16 has been given to the IANA so far [iana.org]

BS that page has no mention of 2001::/16 and indeed your first link already shows allocations to the RIRs outside that range.

since every organization will need only one /48 global routing prefix

/48 may seem like a lot but assuming standard sized subnets (nessacery for stateless autoconfiguration to work) it's only 65536 subnets, I could easilly see a large organisation exceeding that.

So what

[synapse7]

So all this proves is these sites are capable of running both protocols simultaneously and while there is a DNS record that resolves to an ipv6 address, is anybody able to browse to these sites using ipv6 all the way through?

Re:So what

[synapse7]

That is good enough for me, I declare IPv6 day a success!

Re:So what

[squiggleslash]

Why not enable IPv6 and find out?

If you have a modern router, the chances are it already allows you to use IPv6 irrespective of your ISP's support for it. Check the IPv6 settings.

1. Enable "stateless configuration" for the network part (as opposed to DHCPv6 - you don't want that)
2. Enable 6to4 tunneling. If the system asks for a gateway IP address, leave it blank (Linksys routers do for some reason, but they route properly if it's absent.)
3. Enable IPv6 on your operating system. Wait until your computer shows that it has an IP address starting with "2002:", and then try to connect to "ipv6.google.com". If that works, start browsing! You'll use the IPv6 version of the sites you browse today because AAAA is generally routed first, and if there is a problem, you'll notice it with either timeouts/host-cannot-be-reached type errors, or huge delays loading pages.
4. If it didn't work, go to tunnelbroker.net, register for an IPv6 tunnel, and repeat from step 3, substituting using a tunnel instead of 6to4, and waiting until your computer has an IP address beginning with the prefix you get from HE.

Either 6to4, or the tunnel broker, should get you live, real, honest to goodness, IPv6 connectivity. Every computer on your network that has IPv6 enabled will suddenly have a real IP address, and a direct connection to the Internet. For those services that support it, there'll be no stupid tricks involving DMZs and port forwarding you have to do to get SIP, Bittorrent, online video games, or anything else working.

meh

[Combatso]

4,294,967,296 should be enough addresses for any internet

Google logo

[Laser_47]

With Google pushing this so hard, why didn't they change the logo? They should have had one for the IPv6 crowd different from the IPv4....

Re:Whatever happened...

[lxs]

Wiki is your friend.

tl;dr;
They skipped 5 to avoid confusion with the Internet Stream Protocol.

Nobody cares! Except maybe you.

[GreggBz]

I work at a sort of small ISP and we've done testing, implementation, published our website with an AAAA record and put some information on the site for everyone to see.

We've gotten exactly one call (this morning) on IPv6 that I can remember. We published information and started doing some obvious IPv6 things, but no one cares. The group of dual-stack test accounts is pretty small, but they have not even seemed to care or notice. I'd put anyone that asks on a list for testing so they can use IPv6 at home. No one has asked. I guess I could put a big(er) banner on the page.. but really I don't think it would matter much.. and probably scare people.

All in all I will say the experience has been pretty anti-climatic. It was not that difficult to implement. There were bugs of course, (Fedora 13+14 blocking DHCPv6 client traffic, and other NetworkManager bugs) the Cisco CMTS and it's weird detection of static IPv4 only clients... duplicate address detection madness, incomplete support of DHCPv6 + SLAAC in routers (D-Link DIR-615..) but it was just me working on it and I did not have that difficult a time getting our network to route, connect and answer to IPv6. Most of the problems I dealt with were incomparable hardware. Routers and DOCSIS 2.0 + IPv6 modems which are pretty much non existent with the exception of one EMTA I've tested. You have to shell out the bucks for a DOCSIS 3.0 modem evidentially.

Of the D-Link routers I've tested the DIR-825 is the star. It was dead easy to configure. DD-WRT and Open-WRT are not easy and probably there is no build for your router if it only has 4Mb of flash.

Re:Nobody cares! Except maybe you.

[foksoft]

It is not necessary to have all users switched to IPv6. What we need is to have websites available over IPv6 so users who don't have access to IPv4 can access them. Then we can slowly start migrating end-users to IPv6 without worrying about loosing functionality. And this is where today's experiment is aimed. It is test if transition can be done without hacks like naming website ipv6.example.com instead of www.example.com as we are used to with IPv4.

What you tell to your users to be interested in IPv6?
Do you tell them here it is and if you want, you can run it? Or you tell them that when using IPv6, they will get public IP and their skype connection will be better as it will not need to use public relays?
Yes it also depends on the fact whether you actualy give your users public IP address or not. Those who are already behind NAT know what I am talking about.

Re:Nobody cares! Except maybe you.

[Hobart]

But - that's fine!

Remember, you're in the equivalent position to a traffic controller who just put in a new feature controlling the flow of morning traffic during everyone's drive to work. Your work, if done, right, doesn't show up to anyone at all.

What surprised me is that slashdot, hacker news, and reddit are all not participating, but FARK.com is running fine if you have ipv6-only.

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.

Happlily enjoying IPv6 on my network

[Fez]

[Disclaimer: I am a pfSense developer, so I'm a bit biased. For those of you who don't know what pfSense is, it's a BSD-based firewall distribution.]

pfSense 2.0 won't officially support IPv6, but there is a branch available that does IPv6 which will later become 2.1. I'm running it on my home router with a GIF tunnel to Hurricane Electric ( http://he.net/ http://tunnelbroker.net/) to get IPv6 even though my ISPs do not have any native IPv6 support yet. The IPv6 support is a work in progress but is complete enough that it will do what most people want/need.

Instructions for the setup and more info can be found on the pfSense IPv6 board here: http://forum.pfsense.org/index.php/board,52.0.html

I get a 10/10 on the IPv6 tests from http://test-ipv6.com/ on all my PCs as well as my Droid X running 2.3.3. If you're already using pfSense 2.0, give the IPv6 code a try, setup a tunnel to he.net, and enjoy. Doesn't take too long at all to setup.