IPv6 Deployment story of heise.de(one of the biggest news sites in Germany)
h-online.com
h-online.com
Does anyone have any experience in operating a ipv6-enabled site? What is involved?
Basic IPv6 is not that hard but when it comes to things like iptables you have to take care: Most iptables frontends can only handle IPv4 or do that as default. You have to take care of the IPv6 yourself or activate it.
E.g. Phusion Passenger/nginx installer did not activate the IPv6 module on compile time (not sure if this is still the case)
Also I've disabled all RA/autodiscovery functionality which is probably not a good idea to run/listen to on the server side anyway.
I can recommend a nice directory of IPv6 ready sites: http://sixy.ch/
Fast:~ schmidp$ host rails.io
rails.io has address 188.40.182.49
rails.io has IPv6 address 2a01:4f8:100:9461::49
rails.io mail is handled by 10 mail100.fks.de.moriz.net.
Fast:~ schmidp$ ping6 2a01:4f8:100:9461::49
PING6(56=40+8+8 bytes) 2001:470:1f0b:1751:685d:197d:eaff:7861 --> 2a01:4f8:100:9461::49
Request timeout for icmp_seq=0
Request timeout for icmp_seq=1
Request timeout for icmp_seq=2
^C
--- 2a01:4f8:100:9461::49 ping6 statistics ---
4 packets transmitted, 0 packets received, 100.0% packet loss
Fast:~ schmidp$ telnet -6 2a01:4f8:100:9461::49 80
Trying 2a01:4f8:100:9461::49...
^C
Fast:~ schmidp$ ping6 www.heise.de
PING6(56=40+8+8 bytes) 2001:470:1f0b:1751:685d:197d:eaff:7861 --> 2a02:2e0:3fe:100::7
16 bytes from 2a02:2e0:3fe:100::7, icmp_seq=0 hlim=59 time=28.155 ms
16 bytes from 2a02:2e0:3fe:100::7, icmp_seq=1 hlim=59 time=36.392 ms
^C
--- www.heise.de ping6 statistics ---
2 packets transmitted, 2 packets received, 0.0% packet loss round-trip min/avg/max/std-dev = 28.155/32.273/36.392/4.119 ms
While I'd like to switch to IPv6 it just doesn't make sense for us to do so at the moment, even with APNICs IPv4 exhaustion issues.
Of course I may have spend another couple of hours this week when I asked the tunnels, but this was first a good opportunity to learn.
I'm hosting my sites on Hurricane Electric, which is a big supporter of IPv6. All my computers have IPv6 support - even my DSL modem. The only missing link was I had not spend any time configuring it.
But tust being able to ssh from HE to my laptop or other device when I will forget it at home (which happens to me time to time), without having to setup port forwarding will save me more time that that. I know how much time I spend on port-forwarding.
Fixing issues once and for good just seems "better" - and even more when I get to learn something new that will become mainstream very soon with IPv4 exhaustion.
Where was your testing and from all locations used by your corporate clients? Where was the part where you had to predict the impact on end users with incorrectly set up dual stack trying to access the IPv6 site first and get buy in from the people affected? When did you produce the change request documentation and have it approved?
Things that are trivial for home and development environments are not trivial once you have a production site that need to stay up.
I suggest not to wait that long, go ahead & start testing what your IPv6 readiness is. taking example Deployment story of heise.de, dual stack can be implemented without causing much problems.
A perfect day to do this will be June 8, 2011 which is World IPv6 Day, also known as "Test Drive Day".[1]
~$ host xkcd.com
xkcd.com has address 72.26.203.9
xkcd.com has IPv6 address 2001:48c8:1:d:0:23:5482:d026