World IPv6 Day draws near

May 25, 2011 by · Leave a Comment
Filed under: World IPv6 Day 

With ISOC’s World IPv6 Day now only two weeks away, the list of companies and organisations taking part in some form or other is still growing. The most notable content providers to be turning on IPv6 on June 8th are Google and Facebook. Currently you can only access Google services over IPv6 by having your DNS resolvers whitelisted by them, and Facebook are only available via a separate domain www.v6.facebook.com. And worth remembering that Google services include Gmail and YouTube.

It’s thus timely to revitalise the www.ipv6.ac.uk web site with, at least initially, useful information for World IPv6 Day. As June 8th comes closer, we’ll provide more info here on relevant news to sites within the UK academic community.

Today has brought some interesting news. Google Chrome now includes code that will ensure fast fallback to IPv4 if the browser is experiencing IPv6 connectivity problems. A blog post mentions the addition of the feature in the browser and more specific details can be found at the foot of this code note. This means Google’s own browser can perform well for Google users having any problems on the day.

The RIPE NCC has also released its IPv6 Eye Chart which is a web page that performs a set of connectivity tests to dual-stack servers with ‘at a glance’ results. It’s thus a dual-stack test rather than an IPv6 test, but sites will show ‘green’ if they’re reachable over IPv4 or IPv6 within 10 seconds, i.e. if turning on IPv6 at the provider doesn’t break your existing IPv4 connectivity.

It’s worth noting the IPv6 Day is 0:00 to 23:59 UTC on June 8th, so while the UK is asleep, the effects of the ‘test flight’ of IPv6 will be first experienced elsewhere in the world. It will be interesting to see what reported experiences we wake up to on the morning.