The Night the IETF Shut Off IPv4 208
IP Freely writes "At this year's Internet Engineering Task Force meeting in Philadelphia, conference organizers shut off IPv4 for an hour. Surprisingly, chaos did not ensue. 'After everyone got his or her system up and running, many people started looking for IPv6-reachable web sites, reporting those over Jabber instant messaging — which posed its own challenges in the IPv6 department. I was surprised at the number of sites and wide range of content available over IPv6. Apart from — obviously — IPv6-related sites; they ranged from "the largest Gregorian music collection in Internet" to "hardcore torrents." Virtually none of the better known web destinations were reachable over IPv6. That changed when ipv6.google.com popped into existence.'"
So what's the Gregorian music website? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Okay... (Score:5, Informative)
I guess I was expecting too much, but the sites that are indexed appear to be just the regular ipv4 sites, so they have ipv6 enabled the web frontend to the search engine but not the back end that goes and crawls the web.
I was there (Score:5, Informative)
Anyway, after statically configuring DNS servers, things were very smooth. Google et al worked, I could access entire IPv4 web via sixxs.org (just go http://slashdot.org.sixxs.org/ [sixxs.org] to access Slashdot via IPv6), I could SSH to my home servers...only things that seemed a bit odd were failing reverse DNSes on some hops when running traceroute. Jabber worked, IRC worked.
Great experience and experiment.
Re:Okay... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Okay... (Score:4, Informative)
$ dig ipv6.google.com aaaa
;; QUESTION SECTION:
;ipv6.google.com. IN AAAA
;; ANSWER SECTION:
ipv6.google.com. 10792 IN CNAME ipv6.l.google.com.
ipv6.l.google.com. 5 IN AAAA 2001:4860:0:2001::68
ipv6.l.google.com. 5 IN AAAA 2001:4860:0:1001::68
Re:So what's the Gregorian music website? (Score:4, Informative)
http://music.inet.ge/ [music.inet.ge]
More IPv6 sites here (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.sixxs.net/wiki/Category:IPv6-specific_content [sixxs.net]
and there is also some other 'Cool IPv6 stuff' listed on the Sixxs web site:
http://www.sixxs.net/misc/coolstuff/ [sixxs.net]
Re:Okay... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Okay... (Score:5, Informative)
Slashdot is not available over IPv6 (Score:5, Informative)
Here is my list of sites that I was able to reach using native IPv6
using IE worked:
ipv6.google.com
www.ripe.net
www.apnic.net
www.stupi.net
www.arin.net
www.icann.org
www.nlnetlabs.nl
Failed foillowing sites did not work
www.cisco.net/com
www.microsoft.com
www.speakeasy.net
slashdot.org
news.bbc.co.uk
www.mbl.is
www.cnn.com
www.comcast.com/net
news.com.com
www.ibm.com
Slashdot outgeeked by google (Score:3, Informative)
dp@phoenix:~/Desktop$ ping6 ipv6.google.com
PING ipv6.google.com(2001:4860:0:1001::68) 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 2001:4860:0:1001::68: icmp_seq=1 ttl=53 time=221 ms
64 bytes from 2001:4860:0:1001::68: icmp_seq=2 ttl=53 time=214 ms
64 bytes from 2001:4860:0:1001::68: icmp_seq=3 ttl=53 time=221 ms
--- ipv6.google.com ping statistics ---
3 packets transmitted, 3 received, 0% packet loss, time 2026ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 214.969/219.185/221.367/3.006 ms
dp@phoenix:~/Desktop$ ping6 ipv6.slashdot,org
unknown host
dig ipv6.google.com AAAA
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 3, AUTHORITY: 7, ADDITIONAL: 0
;; QUESTION SECTION:
;ipv6.google.com. IN AAAA
;; ANSWER SECTION:
ipv6.google.com. 10455 IN CNAME ipv6.l.google.com.
ipv6.l.google.com. 5 IN AAAA 2001:4860:0:1001::68
ipv6.l.google.com. 5 IN AAAA 2001:4860:0:2001::68
dig slashdot.org AAAA
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 0, AUTHORITY: 1, ADDITIONAL: 0
Re:Okay... (Score:-1, Informative)
130.32.69.208.in-addr.arpa domain name pointer hit-nxdomain.opendns.com.
Re:DHCPv6 (Score:5, Informative)
For example, if I get a complaint about a laptop a few days after the event, how am I supposed to find that host once it's moved onto another network? Are people seriously saying I should have to walk every single router neighbor table (or arp table, if we're talking v4) looking for a specific 64-bit number? The network I work on has literally thousands of routers & switches. That's simply a non-starter. With DHCP, I at least have a > 50% chance of finding the MAC of a host (and where it is now) with a simple query.
In short, business needs are driving it. Almost every discussion I've seen of IPv6 for large enterprises (not ISPs) has assumed that DHCPv6 will be used, and that autoconf + zeroconf will not.
Re:Slashdot is not available over IPv6 (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Okay... (Score:5, Informative)
Hi. I work (among other things) with IPv6 in Google, although I was only distantly released to this launch (some of my code was used in the monitoring components). It's nice to see we're getting attention :-)
You're entirely right that at the moment, only web search has an AAAA record. (However, with some trickery, you can get several other Google services running too -- just add /etc/hosts lines to the same IP, and you'll probably be able to run Maps, GMail and several others over IPv6.) We don't yet crawl, send or receive e-mail, or support GTalk over IPv6, and we definitely cannot guarantee anything about the uptime of the IPv6 versions of our services. (We've had a few years to make a production-grade IPv4 network, give us some time to make it IPv6-ready too!) Think of it as the first baby step; although we don't have a roadmap published (we almost never talk about future products in Google) I think it's pretty safe to say that there will be more.
Whether there should be services that are not available over IPv4, though, is an entirely different discussion. If you had a cool service and could offer it to the world, would you keep it away from 99.9% of the Internet just because you could?
/* Steinar */
- Software engineer, Google Norway
Re:Okay... (Score:3, Informative)
Leave it disabled though, it murders your browsing speed.
Re:Okay... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Okay... (Score:5, Informative)
Basically you can either buy a cisco and upgrade to an ISP that'll route ipv6 (that's the neatest way of doing it, but is expensive and limits your ISP choice), or if you can get hold of an old WRT54G you can install a custom firmware that supports ipv6 and create a tunnel to a tunnel broker somewhere - it'll be much slower (tunnel latency is typically 300ms+ for the first hop because there are so few of them) but you'll be 'on' the ipv6 internet.
Re:DHCPv6 (Score:4, Informative)
You need to distribute the addresses of DNS, NTP, WINS, etc. etc. - for that you need DHCPv6.
Zeroconf will not cut it. That's for discovering services on the local subnet only... not broadcasting DNS addresses etc. On top of that it won't cross routers (by design), making it unsuitable for any reasonable size network (It has exactly the same issues as Netbios broadcast in fact, which hardly ever works.. hence the WINS hack which also hardly ever works).
Reverse DNS you mentioned - this not solvable without DHCPv6 at present (and is a critical issue for a well functioning network).
The other issue with stateless autoconfig is you can't fix the addresses centrally. In theory they should stay the same but in practice network cards die.. and the address is just the MAC address of the network card. If that happens to your main webserver you're screwed.
Re:Hardcore Torrents (Score:1, Informative)
http://hardcoretorrents.com/ [hardcoretorrents.com]
#9 on this list of IPv6 web sights.
http://6bone.informatik.uni-leipzig.de/ipv6/stats/stats.php3 [uni-leipzig.de]
Re:Okay... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Okay... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Okay... (Score:-1, Informative)
Re:DHCPv6 (Score:3, Informative)
On the "MAC addresses change" note, an ease solution is to simply change the MAC address of the replacement card to match the old one. Since the old one is no longer in use there's no conflict, and then there's no external change to be made anywhere on the network. You've have to type the new MAC address in somewhere to get the DHCP server to hand out the same address, so you might as well just do it locally.
Likewise DHCP is hardly the only option for reverse-DNS registration; it doesn't take a whole lot of scripting to submit the local hostname to some remote service that can update DNS. We've decided the DHCP server is a good place to do this, because it knows both those items and is centrally administered, but it's certainly not complicated to replicate with other mechanisms.
Now, you may prefer to do things via DHCP, and I wouldn't necessarily blame you, but it's not strictly necessary, and for many simple networks -- say home routers -- there's no reason for DHCP at all.
Re:IPv5 (Score:3, Informative)
No, IPv5 is ST-II, the Internet Stream protocol, defined in RFC 1190. TUBA is one of the experimental proposals that led to IPv6, and has never been assigned an IP version number.
Re:Okay... (Score:3, Informative)
I've been tempted to play with it, but I don't believe my Wii can handle it. It's not just routers that need some work.
Get IPv6 (Score:4, Informative)
A lot of people think they need their ISP's help to get IPv6 connectivity. That's not the case. If you're running Windows Vista, or if you use an Apple Airport router, you should get connectivity to the IPv6 Internet out of the box. If you're running Linux, I've writtent a short HOWTO about IPv6 under Linux [jussieu.fr].
Re:Okay... (Score:4, Informative)
The only other reason I can think of for IPv6 being slower is if you are tunnelling IPv6 over IPv4 to a distant tunnel broker node. This too is nothing to do with Firefox or even your machine.