World IPv6 Day On June 8

dkd903 writes "On June 8, 2011, around 300 websites will test the IPv6 readiness of the internet. The participating websites includes Google, Facebook, Yahoo and Bing. In preparation for the day, Google is notifying users to test if they are ready."

Re:Where is the Google test?

[gnick]

Try here. [test-ipv6.com]
Or, for more info on test day, Try here. [test-ipv6.com]

Re:Where is the Google test?

[3.1415926535]

Safari, for example, had a bug until recently that caused page loads to fail if the site has an IPv6 address but the client doesn't have connectivity. In addition, there are a bunch of autoconfigured tunnel technologies that can cause problems. See, for example, APNIC's chief scientist's report on Teredo: http://www.potaroo.net/ispcol/2011-04/teredo.html [potaroo.net]

Re:What services will be online?

[kai_hiwatari]

It is not just http traffic. The participants include the Xbox network as well. List of participants - http://worldipv6day.org/participants/index.html [worldipv6day.org]

Re:Where is the Google test?

[SuricouRaven]

Because if the client and server both have IPv6 connectivity, many clients will connect by IPv6. As they should. The problem is that just because both have connectivity doesn't mean they have connectivity to each other - the IPv6 part of the internet is still being configured, by admins largely unfamiliar with the new technology and on hardware with had support added as an afterthought. It'll get better, but right now there are still many links that have problems. The IPv4 side has a few too, but it's had a decade for engineers to fix almost all of them.

Re:My ISP doesn't offer IPv6

[davew]

The test is aimed squarely at you.

What stops the large content providers from serving over IPv6 right now today is a level of brokenness that affects a fraction of a percent of users. These are computers or networks which are nominally IPv4 only, but have some misconfigured IPv6 setup that is actively causing problems connecting to sites. The proportion of users is tiny, but if you're facebook, that's still a lot of users. Wednesday next will expose these problems on a temporary, scheduled basis.

If you run IT support for an organisation, it would be wise to see the results of, say, the RIPE IPv6 eye chart [ripe.net] on your client machines.

Re:Where is the Google test?

[petermgreen]

Most clients will fall back to v4 if v6 fails. The problem comes when the v6 connection attempt gets no reply at all (e.g. due to routing problems, firewalls, links that are down but the system doesn't know they are down or some combination), the client will then wait for it to time out before falling back which if the client uses standard OS timeouts can take an excruciatingly long time.

The cause of the packets not getting any reply at all may be local to the client but it could also quite possiblly be in an ISP nework somewhere. Remember the internet (whether v4 or v6) is just a (very large) set of network providers cooperating (through ICANN and the organisations it delegates to) to use non-conflicting addressing and to foward traffic to each other. Even on the better maintained v4 side it's not that unusual for two ISPs to be unable to exchange traffic for a while due to some screwup.