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The Internet Technology

World IPv6 Day: Most-watched Tech Event Since Y2K 243

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."
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World IPv6 Day: Most-watched Tech Event Since Y2K

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  • by elrous0 ( 869638 ) * on Wednesday June 08, 2011 @09:30AM (#36373978)

    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.

    • 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.

      You joke, but those (possibly fictional but still representative) gaskets were designed to rot. There exist compounds which do that job, which cost very slightly more money, which will last longer than you will. In this particular case, the problem could be solved with all metal gaskets. In other cases, substituting silicone, nylon, or viton (depending on the application) for neoprene is what is needed.

      One of the selling points of my motherboard (GA-MA770-UD3P 1.0, I.I.R. all the little letters C.) was that

      • by gnick ( 1211984 )

        Anyone know of any product lines (of any kind) designed specifically for durability?

        Pyramids? Maybe not an ideal design, but that's certainly what the engineers of the time were shooting for. You know, durability and difficulty to assemble.

        • The problem is, I can't exactly call up the local contractor and have one put in. Maybe Halliburton would come out and pour me some shitty concrete.

          • by gnick ( 1211984 )

            OK, LOCAL contractor I'll grant you. But with sufficient real estate and a sufficient supply of indentured laborers, I don't see the hurdle. However be warned, the folks that have opted to use these for vacation homes have taken severely extended vacations. In the words of the prophets, "You can check out any time you'd like, but you can never leave."

      • by xaxa ( 988988 )

        Anyone know of any product lines (of any kind) designed specifically for durability?

        Anything at all that's designed for durability?

        Anything where replacing it is more expensive or inconvenient than paying for something engineered to last as long as possible, especially anything where safety is critical. Parts of power grids, railway tracks/stations/vehicles, things on large buildings, satellites, parts of continuously-run factories, bridges/tunnels, ...

      • To be fair gaskets, especially automotive ones, are in most cases easily replaced with much more durable ones. When ever I replace automotive gaskets I get the copper ones if available, or the ones with the "lifetime" warranty. If looking for something designed to last I suggest the Model 500 phone [wikipedia.org], it seems that when a company actually has to support something they do a better job designing it.
    • by Kjella ( 173770 )

      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.

      • by elrous0 ( 869638 ) * on Wednesday June 08, 2011 @10:13AM (#36374492)

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

      • -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.

        The hard part for the prepared is not being discovered and eaten (out of house and home, if not literally) by the unprepared. So the question is, how many years. It's not that difficult or expensive to stock three or even five years' worth of food if you're willing to be very bored with your meals. Better to be bored than hungry, however.

        Incidentally, anybody not stockpiling food right now is going to either be hungry or poorer by next year. Fuel costs are projected to rise, and crop failures are currently

        • by elrous0 ( 869638 ) *

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

          On the upside, those of you looking for that little extra incentive to finally go on that diet you've been meaning to go on are in luck.

        • 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!

      • by Toonol ( 1057698 )
        Nuclear winter is was mainly a propaganda device. It would have a cooling effect, but the claimed magnitude was terrifically overstated. It's a bit like global warming; real, but it's not going to result in 20 meter ocean risings.
    • by mellon ( 7048 )

      Dude, it's way worse than that. Slashdot doesn't work unless you enable IPv4. I'm posting this using IP-over-carrier-pigeon!

      (I'm really disappointed that slashdot, supposedly a geek site, didn't bother to enable IPv6 for World IPv6 day.)

  • Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Wednesday June 08, 2011 @09:32AM (#36374000)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by 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.

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

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

        <getoffmylawn>And that's the way we like it!</getoffmylawn>

    • by ledow ( 319597 )

      And yet they've posted four IPv6 stories in the past month (and dozens before) where EVERYONE brings this up too.

      You'd think they'd have bothered to do it by now. Shows you how "with the geeks" this site really is.

    • ...still have no IPv6 addresses on their main websites.

      • As much as I like to bash Comcast, they actually have been on the ball when it comes to IPv6. They have been testing tunneling for their customers (I'm using their 6to4 to participate in IP6 Day), they have a IPv6 test suite for customers, and they are planning to go Dual-stack.

  • This event had been very unpublicized for this to be the most-anticipated 24 hours in tech industry for the last 10 years.
    • by gnick ( 1211984 )

      It doesn't need to be - Very few people need to know to avoid it affecting their normal routine. My ISP (f'n Comcast) isn't helping me out with IPv6 and neither is my employer (a major national lab), but I expect zero effect. I suspect that I'm just a typical example of the vast majority of the population.

      • by Sancho ( 17056 ) *

        It doesn't need to be - Very few people need to know to avoid it affecting their normal routine. My ISP (f'n Comcast) isn't helping me out with IPv6 and neither is my employer (a major national lab), but I expect zero effect. I suspect that I'm just a typical example of the vast majority of the population.

        You're actually among the most likely people to notice, then. Depending upon your OS/browser/configuration, sites can fail or become quite slow if they advertise a AAAA record but you only have v4 connectivity. In fact, that's one of the things that's being measured today.

        Me? I have v6 and I don't notice a difference. I have to go looking with tcpdump to see if I'm actually connecting to the v6 address or to the v4 address. As far as I can find, there's no place in my browser which tells me one way or

    • by FST777 ( 913657 )
      Not for lack of trying, but with the vast majority of the people, even the tech-aware ones, the typical reaction to anything "IPv6" is: "Wha..?", leading to lack of interest at first mention.

      Which 24 hours sine Y2K were more anticipated? The launch of the iDevices? Is that really the tech industry? I work in networking (at a large web-based content-provider), and in "the field", this is a very, very important day (which we all hope shall pass relatively silently).
  • by simoncpu was here ( 1601629 ) on Wednesday June 08, 2011 @09:36AM (#36374066)
    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: (Score:2, Funny)

      I was quite sad that Slashdot didn't take part in the World IPv6 Day.

      That's on the list right after getting UNICODE to work.

      • by tepples ( 727027 )

        That's on the list right after getting UNICODE to work.

        As I understand it, the decision to make Unicode not work was intentional. Slashdot started to use a character whitelist soon after vandals started to post comments with a directionality control character. The vandals used this to spoof moderation scores and break the layout of following comments. I'm willing to provide citations on request.

        • I'm willing to provide citations on request.

          Do you have them handy? I'd don't quite remember the time frame - I'm thinking this was about a decade ago, when the primary use of Unicode was to break Slashdot, but today that's much different.

          Everybody else seems to have figure out how to handle Unicode input and re-display.

    • by tom17 ( 659054 )

      Did Facebook & Yahoo turn theirs off again, or are there actually problems with this whole thing?

      ~$ host yahoo.com
      yahoo.com has address 67.195.160.76
      yahoo.com has address 69.147.125.65
      yahoo.com has address 72.30.2.43
      yahoo.com has address 98.137.149.56
      yahoo.com has address 209.191.122.70
      yahoo.com mail is handled by 1 e.mx.mail.yahoo.com.

      ~$ host facebook.com
      facebook.com has address 69.63.189.11
      facebook.com has address 69.63.181.12
      facebook.com has address 69.63.189.16
      facebook.com mail is handled by 10 smtp

      • I don't know why, but many sites have AAAA records for www.example.org but not for example.org:

        $ host -t AAAA yahoo.com
        yahoo.com has no AAAA record

        $ host -t AAAA facebook.com
        facebook.com has no AAAA record

        $ host -t AAAA www.yahoo.com
        www.yahoo.com is an alias for fpfd.wa1.b.yahoo.com.
        fpfd.wa1.b.yahoo.com has IPv6 address 2001:4998:f011:1fe::3000
        fpfd.wa1.b.yahoo.com has IPv6 address 2001:4998:f011:1fe::3001

        $ host -t AAAA www.facebook.com
        www.facebook.com has IPv6 address 2620:0:1c08:4000:face:b0
        • by tom17 ( 659054 )

          Ahhh oops. That explains it.

          Also, I noticed that although host was not giving an ipv6 addy, wget was, but that's just because facebook.com redirects to www.facebook.com that does have ipv6. Missed that first time.

          ~$ wget facebook.com
          --2011-06-08 12:00:04-- http://facebook.com/ [facebook.com]
          Resolving facebook.com... 69.63.181.12, 69.63.189.16, 69.63.189.11
          Connecting to facebook.com|69.63.181.12|:80... connected.
          HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 301 Moved Permanently
          Location: http://www.facebook.com/ [facebook.com] [following]
          --20

      • by xaxa ( 988988 )

        Try:

        > host www.facebook.com
        www.facebook.com has address 69.63.189.11
        www.facebook.com has IPv6 address 2620:0:1c18:0:face:b00c:0:2

        > host www.yahoo.com
        www.yahoo.com is an alias for fpfd.wa1.b.yahoo.com.
        fpfd.wa1.b.yahoo.com has address 69.147.125.65
        fpfd.wa1.b.yahoo.com has address 67.195.160.76
        fpfd.wa1.b.yahoo.com has IPv6 address 2a00:1288:f006:1fe::3000
        fpfd.wa1.b.yahoo.com has IPv6 address 2a00:1288:f006:1fe::3001
        fpfd.wa1.b.yahoo.com has IPv6 address 2a00:1288:f00e:1fe::3000
        fpfd.wa1.b.yahoo.com has IPv

  • I had calls getting dropped every 5 minutes or so last night. Then again, Skype's entire network seems to go down on occasion, so perhaps an IPv6 test is an unlikely cause.

    But, I'm safely small enough that my ISP is just starting to talk about offering an IPv6 trial in a city far far away. I'm signed up for them to let me know in 4 years that IPv6 is available for testing...

  • by SpryGuy ( 206254 ) on Wednesday June 08, 2011 @09:52AM (#36374248)

    That's my question.

  • by Sinus0idal ( 546109 ) on Wednesday June 08, 2011 @09:52AM (#36374252)

    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'? :)

    • by mykdavies ( 1369 )
      Nicely spotted. In case anyone else missed the full thing as I did the first time round, Cisco's address ends c:15c0:d06:f00d = cisco dog food, very clever.
    • by rwa2 ( 4391 ) *

      Yeah, surprised Google didn't manage to get anything with "8008" in it. Maybe in IPv4space they already spent too much money buying 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 from L3 that they didn't want to spring extra for 8.0.0.8 as well.

  • 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?
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • Yes ... no problems at all here (I have a native IPv6 connection, not tunnelled). This isn't really very surprising - these sites have mostly been resolvable and accessible via IPv6 for a long time through alternate domains (e.g. ipv6.google.com, www.v6.facebook.com). All that changed is that they have now published AAAA records for the ~main~ domains as well.

      • I'm guessing that they were testing the ipv6 on separate domains because if someone were using IPv6 and it were broken on their end, it might be hard to figure out what was wrong.

      • Facebook doesn't really do IPv6. Bits of the site do, bits don't (notably the part responsible for delivering images). Try dropping IPv4 and seeing how well it still works. The BBC is the same.

        Still, it's a start.

    • is anybody able to browse to these sites using ipv6 all the way through?

      Yes. Those of us who have free IPv6 tunnels from sixxs.net or he.net, among others.

    • by tom17 ( 659054 )

      Yes

  • by Combatso ( 1793216 ) on Wednesday June 08, 2011 @09:59AM (#36374334)
    4,294,967,296 should be enough addresses for any internet
  • 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....

  • is already started. Look at Facebooks IPV6 address closely...

    snark@toluene:~$ host www.facebook.com
    www.facebook.com has address 69.171.224.39
    www.facebook.com has IPv6 address 2620:0:1c00:0:face:b00c::

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • The last 64 bits of the address can be whatever you want, as the entire /64 space is allocated to you. So it can't really be a land-grab ... it's only the ~first~ 64 bits of the address that are unique and assignable.

    • by jrumney ( 197329 )
      You too can get enough IPv6 addresses to make silly vanity addresses that noone other than a few geeks will see. Hardly a land grab.
  • by GreggBz ( 777373 ) on Wednesday June 08, 2011 @10:15AM (#36374512) Homepage
    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.
    • by foksoft ( 848194 )
      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

    • Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Wednesday June 08, 2011 @12:47PM (#36376560)
      Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • ... owing to the test site being accessible only by means of a long and winding tunnel housing an 8ft gauge railway on which massively long engines haul tiny carriages.

  • I have a host on dyndns.org and up until yesterday, the AAAA record came back, but today it says there is no AAAA record, even though it is still configured in my account on their site.

    Anyone else found this problem today?

  • by IpSo_ ( 21711 ) on Wednesday June 08, 2011 @12:20PM (#36376226) Homepage Journal

    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.

  • Some participants need to grow a clue by not activly working to turn IPv6 day into disaster day... Please add more...

    1. Microsoft has a patch that demotes IPv6 access for one day only. Not only does this throw a wrench in the worlds ability to gauge problems but it does nothing to solve the end users issue. Paradoxically simply disabling IPv6 is much better at this point as not breaking IPv4 is much more important to the forward progress of IPv6 deployment than a few end-users who can enable IPv6 later wh

  • by Fez ( 468752 ) * on Wednesday June 08, 2011 @12:41PM (#36376482)

    [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/ [he.net] http://tunnelbroker.net/ [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 [pfsense.org]

    I get a 10/10 on the IPv6 tests from http://test-ipv6.com/ [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.

  • $ host -t mx gmail.com
    gmail.com mail is handled by 5 gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com.
    gmail.com mail is handled by 10 alt1.gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com.
    gmail.com mail is handled by 20 alt2.gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com.
    gmail.com mail is handled by 30 alt3.gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com.
    gmail.com mail is handled by 40 alt4.gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com.
    $ host gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com.
    gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com has address 72.14.213.27$ host -t mx cisco.com
    cisco.com mail is handled by 10 sj-inbound-a.cisco.com.
    cisco.com mail

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