Major Sites To Join ‘World IPv6 Day’

netbuzz writes "Facebook, Google, and Yahoo are among the major sites on board with what the Internet Society is dubbing 'World IPv6 Day,' a collective trial scheduled for June 8. 'It's an exciting opportunity to take IPv6 for a test flight and try it on for a full 24 hours,' says Leslie Daigle, the Internet Society's Chief Internet Technology Officer. 'Hopefully, we will see positive results from this trial so we will see more IPv6 sooner rather than later.'"

Heise.de did it first...

[Anonymous Coward]

The operator of one of the biggest German web sites [alexa.com], the Heise publishing house, held its own IPv6 day on the 16th of September 2010. Their domains got AAAA records in addition to the IPv4 A records and the web servers responded to IPv4 and IPv6. Long story short: The test produced much fewer problems than expected and two weeks after the test, Heise.de enabled IPv6 permanently. The story is here (in German). [heise.de]

Re:A site seems to be missing from the participant

[SlothDead]

You mean the one that has no Unicode support?

Re:How do I get to their sites using IPv6?

[Bob_Sheep]

Use a tunnel broker service. There are at least 2 free tunnel brokers, SixXs [sixxs.net] and Hurricane Electric [he.net]

Re:How do I get to their sites using IPv6?

[icebraining]

They won't turn IPv4 off for probably many years. But if you actually want to try IPv6 without ISP support, you can try a free tunnel broker [gogo6.com].

Re:Dual-stack mode

[tlhIngan]

Yes, they will continue to run it in dual-stack. But instead of current practice where you need to enter ipv6.google.com you will just simply type www.google.com and will reach them via IPv6. It is similar for other sites. You, who are like me stuck in IPv4 space mark June 8 in your calendars. As it might be day when you might not reach some resources on internet. It is due to fact how DNS will be resolved. Your computer will ask for IP addres and will get AAAA record but you don't have IPv6 connectivity so you will not connect. In better case it will fall back to IPv4.

Actually, you will still be able to reach those resources just fine, with patience. What happens is (and always has when OSes started blindly enabling IPv6) the connection waits for the IPv6 connection first. If that doesn't get established, it falls back to IPv4 and you get your content. What everyone found is well, pages took forever to load as you had to wait for the IPv6 TCP session to return an error first before the IPv4 fallback.

Frankly, the problem with IPv6 is the lack of a simple drop-in router replacement that works as well as current NAT routers. I don't care to have 3 IPv6 IPs on every IPv6 capable device on my network (nevermind all the IPv4-only gear I have). Yes, 3 IPv6 addresses, because you'll have a link-local (always present), your internet IPv6 address (you get a prefix that's usually /64, so all the PCs will use that prefix and add a suffix, and that will get you to the router), and since entering random numbers and letters is annoying, and a private set of IPv6 addresses (FC00:: prefix (/64) is for private networks, akin to 10/8 and other IPv4 private space). Why can't I have a NATv6 box that can have 192.168.0.1 and FC00::1, and keep everything going the way it is? Bonus to handle IPv4-to-IPv6 translation as well (there are tricks that you can do to have IPv4-only devices support IPv6 addresses, like ipv6-literal.net virtual domain Windows has to support IPv6 CIFS and IPv6 address entry).

That's what people want - a simple box they can drop into their network without having to reconfigure their intranet immediately that works just like their existing NAT router.