The WING Blog

The Web and Internetworking Group at BU/CS

Jun

2

World IPv6 Day is next week.

By Mark Crovella

The last IPv4 addresses have been allocated by IANA.   It seems unavoidable that soon, some new hosts are going to need to be IPv6 only.

One set of stakeholders that have resisted IPv6 has been content providers.   Content providers have been concerned that if they enable IPv6, users with older software will not be able to access their sites, or will have poor performance.  This has lead to a “not me first!” attitude — a classic suboptimal Nash equilibrium in which no single content provider has incentive to switch, since they may lose customers to other providers.

An interesting experiment designed to break out of this suboptimal equilibrium is for all the parties to agree to a simultaneous switch of strategies.   That has led to “World IPv6 Day” — June 8 — in which most of the largest content providers will simultaneously enable IPv6 for one day, and “see what happens.”  The idea is that maybe IPv6 won’t be as bad as some people think, and even if there are problems, we might learn some things to help us address them.

Estimates are that roughly 0.05% of users could have difficulty accessing participating sites on this day.  In case you are concerned, Microsoft has a fix available here.

I won’t be online myself much that day.   But I would be very interested in any observations that anyone has about unusual Internet behavior that day!    Please comment if you notice anything interesting.


4 Responses so far

I think you are likely to read about it in the paper 🙂 Check this out:
http://www.networkworld.com/news/2011/060611-ipv6-security.html?t51hb&hpg1=mp

Wow – it just goes to show there is a security angle to everything … I have sent out pings to see if people have ipv6 netflow available from this event … maybe we can observe some attacks.

Heh – Here is the address that Facebook is advertising today:

2620::1c18:0:face:b00c:0:3

Got to love “face:b00c” 🙂

I guess with IPV6 we have enough bits to get “vanity” IP address blocks 🙂

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