World IPv6 Day coming up

Posted by: stak
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Posted on: 2011-05-28 09:09:38

World IPv6 Day is coming soon, on June 8. For those of who don't know what it is, it's when a bunch of major websites (Google, Facebook, etc.) will go dual-stack (serving their website via both IPv4 and IPv6 simultaneously). The reason this hasn't really been done yet is because according to previous measurements, this will break things for around 0.1% of clients.

If you haven't yet done so, you should go to test-ipv6.com from every browser/machine that you use to access the web, to see if you have an incompatible client. If you do, you should follow the instructions to fix things. If you don't, then a good chunk of the Internet will not work for you on June 8. More importantly, all those websites participating in IPv6 day will see a drop in users on that day, and revert back to IPv4-only. On the other hand, if you (and everybody else) fix your setup so that you can successfully browse dual-stack sites, then dual-stack is more likely to gain widespread adoption, thereby breaking the chicken-and-egg adoption problem IPv6 has been having so far.

Note that being compatible with dual-stack doesn't mean you have to do the more complicated setup to get yourself an IPv6 address. It just means that you can connect with IPv4 to a site that supports both IPv4 and IPv6. Although if you want to start using IPv6 now, you're quite welcome to do that as well.

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