An IPv6 Day Failure
By stretch | Wednesday, June 8, 2011 at 1:39 a.m. UTC
I'll assume that by now you've heard that June 8th is World IPv6 Day. While I would have loved to declare that packetlife.net is now IPv6-ready, that sadly is not the case. My hosting provider, Rackspace, hasn't yet extended native IPv6 Internet connectivity to its customers. Bummer.
Yes, it's plausible to deliver the site via an IPv6 tunnel as I've done in the past, but I'd also need to migrate the site's DNS to a provider which supports AAAA records. I also don't like relying on a free tunnel service which introduces an additional point of failure between the site and its users.
And frankly, setting up an IPv6-in-IPv4 tunnel defeats the purpose of today's benchmark anyway. The idea behind World IPv6 Day is to encourage providers to begin delivering content and services via native IPv6, not through the migration workarounds from years ago. I hope to have packetlife.net available via native IPv6 by the end of 2011, but it's out of my hands until Rackspace steps up.
Posted in Announcements
Comments
June 8, 2011 at 9:13 a.m. UTC
Native isn't all it's cracked up to be anyway. Not with the likes of Cogent still refusing to peer with HE.
June 8, 2011 at 1:43 p.m. UTC
I wish Comcast would bother giving their business customers IPv6 addresses. I'm forced to tunnel.
June 12, 2011 at 7:24 p.m. UTC
Shame you had to miss out on that 0.02% of all traffic. http://asert.arbornetworks.com/2011/06/monitoring-world-ipv6-day/
June 13, 2011 at 1:56 p.m. UTC
http://www.softlayer.com/
Offers IPv6 right out of the box.
June 19, 2011 at 11:01 p.m. UTC
@biscuits: perhaps this wasn't what you meant, but IPv6 day wasn't about the traffic. Specifically, domestic market ISPs didn't enable their customers which was why the traffic was so little. The day was about content providers and backbone providers getting some valuable experience and feedback, with reduced business risk.
Maybe now that some have shown it's possible without the sky falling in, the likes of rackspace will follow suit in time for the next (?) IPv6 event.
June 20, 2011 at 4:39 p.m. UTC
For the curious, here's a ~19 minute presentation on Yahoo!'s experiences on World IPv6 Day, and why content providers want to move to IPv6:
http://www.livestream.com/oreillyconfs/video?clipId=pla_ff734d56-f3aa-4d75-90ac-99cdf215c8df
Their experiences with pre-IPv6-day testing are pretty interesting. When you're staring at graphs and expecting things to break, you'll see something break.
July 11, 2011 at 1:50 a.m. UTC
Dude! Hurricane Electric and Dreamhost both offer native IPv6. I am tired of Rackspace's crap. They've been marketing IPv6 support for over a year, but they obviously don't. From their side it's not that hard. You really should just move...