Most IPv6 ‘Hiccups’ Were Expected; Some Key Arabic Websites Were Inaccessible

IPv6 works, it works with IPv4 and it’s ready for production, Champagne told us. There are still challenges with IPv6’s performance, and it’s not as good as IPv4’s, but that’s because it’s not used as much, he said. Some websites may have run a bit more slowly Wednesday, but the problems were nothing a little use won’t “shake out of the system,” he said.

"Virtually all content providers” that signed up to test IPv6 were reachable on IPv4 and IPv6 June 8, Kisteleki said. RIPE measurements showed a few glitches, including the inability of users of U.K. country-code top-level domain registry Nominet to reach Google, Microsoft Bing, YouTube and other websites via IPv6, but those could have resulted from several factors, Kisteleki said. Among other things, it could mean RIPE’s measurement box was misbehaving or there was a network problem, he said. The readings provide a status, not an explanation, he said. In addition, some packets of a certain size failed to make it between points, but those problems were spotted and content providers are fixing them, he said. RIPE didn’t measure end-user connectivity but Kisteleki said he hadn’t heard of any issues.

There were concerns going into IPv6 Day, said Cisco Distinguished Engineer and former Internet Engineering Task Force area director Mark Townsley in an interview. Although the technology has been around for about 10 years, there were “varying levels of confidence” about an event that was a “big deal,” he said. Cisco prepared for it by doing a series of dry runs which went according to plan, boosting Townsley’s confidence, he said. It also negotiated with Akamai, which runs Cisco’s domain name system, to give Cisco users with IPv6 capability an IPv6 Internet address, he said. Cisco handled its IPv6 traffic itself in order to test its own gear and learn from what it directly observed, he said.

Cisco’s technical services team was on alert but no end-user problems directly attributable to IPv6 Day had been reported so far, Townsley said. But measurements and analyses made during the test indicate some users were affected, he said. There was some indication that some who experienced problems understood that it was IPv6 Day and realized the trouble stemmed from badly configured IPv6, he said. Cisco wanted people to be able to make that connection, he said.

Nominet’s system showed no issues in its capability to pass Internet traffic to or from IPv6 addresses, and the registry has run IPv4 and IPv6 for the past year, the registry said. A RIPE monitoring box checking what happens to traffic from Nominet systems to external destinations appeared to find a glitch with IPv6 traffic heading to, but not reaching some destinations, it said.

Registry investigations, however, showed the problem was with the RIPE monitoring box, whose routing was configured differently from its own infrastructure, Nominet said. That configuration was successfully changed, it said. “This is what IPv6 Day is all about,” Nominet said: “Drawing attention to the changeover, flushing out any issues and working with responsible organizations to make the transition as smooth as possible."

Arabic localized versions for Google, Yahoo and Microsoft Bing didn’t work Wednesday when the IPv6 service was based outside the Middle East because local IPv6 is nonexistent, Ladid said. Google used the IPv6 address coming from Holland, Bing thought the connection came from Canada because the “tunnel” is Freenet6 in Montreal, and Yahoo didn’t default to the maktoob.yahoo.com portal, its Arabic version, he said. To get local versions to work, Middle Eastern ISPs should provide IPv6 service access to their subscribers over their own IPv6-assigned address blocks rather than using addresses elsewhere, he said.

Otherwise, things ran smoothly as standard pings to the regular Web pages of Facebook, Bing, CNN and Google all defaulted to IPv6 addresses and responses without the need for the “brute force” of “ping-6” (pinging an IPv6 address to find out where it is), Ladid said. Running in IPv4 mode also raised no issues, he said.

Akamai will study the results, Champagne said. He said he hopes that in coming months companies will begin discussing full-time rollout of the technology. It’s good that everyone trialed it on the same day instead of having just a few take the lead and face looking stupid, he said. The fact that this was a concerted effort should build enough confidence that organizations will now think seriously of making the switch, he said.

Cisco also plans to collect and study the data, Townsley said. The results will be thrashed out at several industry forums next week, he said. People are already starting to ask whether there should be another IPv6 day or even an IPv6 week, he said.

A one-day IPv6 connection “is a marketing exercise” that it’s hoped will convince participants, including the major Internet companies, to continue offering IPv6 in the long run, said Olivier Crepin-Leblond of the IPv6 Matrix Project. The Internet Society England project was launched in 2009 to design and install “IPv6 Crawler” software to check the domain name system regularly in order to detect IPv6 connectivity in DNS servers, Web servers and other systems, an April presentation said.

The Matrix project takes measurements over a longer term than one day, Crepin-Leblond said. It will only have an indication of whether IPv6 Day has had any impact on the spread of the technology once it’s gone through a complete testing cycle, likely in a month’s time, he said. Organizations that ran IPv4 and IPv6 for one day only and then rolled back to IPv4 only won’t appear in the long-term statistics, he said.

The European Commission made its ec.europa.eu website available for IPv6 users Wednesday to set an example and encourage other public sectors to persuade European companies and manufacturers to make new smart devices and servers IPv6-compatible, it said. Only about 2 percent of all Internet traffic is IPv6-ready today, so existing Internet architecture must be upgraded to the new technology to avoid slowing down the Internet, it said. The EC will host a June 17 IPv6 workshop and fund a major pilot project to spur deployment of IPv6 by public authorities, it said.