The IPv6 Challenge | Hacker News Reader

The IPv6 Challenge

cloudflare.com

37 pointsjgrahamc35 comments

There's a tiny restartless Firefox plugin that will tell you if the pages you browse are using IPv6, https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/sixornot/ and one for Chrome (written by p1mrx here): https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ecanpcehffngcegjma...

Why IPVFoo, vs other IPx-checker addons?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4024195

"You are accepting the IPv6 challenge." => "ERRORDismissInvalid value specified."

The future is no... oh wait, never mind.

I work for CloudFlare. We're looking into why that's happening.

EDIT: Fixed.

So... what incentive is there to make your services IPv6 compatible today other than geek cred?

I set up an IPv6 tunnel at home, and recently added AAAA records to my web site (a tech blog). For my very technical audience, barely 1.8% traffic is IPv6. If I look only at the RSS feed, it goes up to 3%, which seems to be mostly Apple machines and hosted RSS aggregators.

Depends how you look at it. There might not be an individual incentive for you to do it, but there is a general incentive for us to do it. You can choose to contribute towards the move to IPv6, or not. I prefer to contribute, because I recognise how important it is.

Who failed? Pages show different time to launch: https://www.cloudflare.com/ipv6-challenge http://www.worldipv6launch.org/

Doesn't look too convincing.

One of them is on summer time?

It looks like CloudFlare are counting down until 2012-06-06 00:00:00 in your local time, while the WorldIPv6Launch site is counting down to 2012-06-06 00:00:00 UTC.

That's correct. We were using local time and the World IPv6 Launch Day is using UTC time. We're going to update the CloudFlare page to also use UTC.

Sadly, the only way my most recent website (http://websocket.us/) was able to get IPv6 support was via CloudFlare.

And my personal website, not being on CloudFlare, has no IPv6 support. I hope my provider gives me IPv6 someday...

May I ask why it matters to you? Anyone running v6 has v4 support running as well, otherwise they couldn't get anywhere on the net.

What's the point of IPv6 day if we don't get IPv6 support?

Linode offers IPv6

http://www.linode.com/IPv6/

I tried signing up but it seems like the site is under load and not responding well - e.g. pages aren't loading, timeouts, etc.

Just wondering if anyone else is having the same problem?

Is this a good sign for a company whose main service is to make your site geographically faster?

When will phones get IPv6? Then you can host services yourself, e.g a website, your email. Basically opens up all sorts of possibilities that will allow people to own their content.

(yeah sure you prob want to back up to somewhere off your phone)

I'm sure phone providers will find a way to configure their links so that they work the same as with IPv4 (i.e. no incoming connection allowed). This isn't even necessarily a bad thing - remember all these jailbroken iphones with the default root password running an sshd? While not providing perfect security by a long shot, denying all incoming connections to a client on the firewall can help mitigate some issues.

It also "fixes" a lot of potential "problems" like people running p2p software on their phones or using VoIP instead of the much higher priced voice calls by the phone proivder (yes. voip works today, but it could work ever so much better if these devices were accessible directly)

One of Australia's 3g networks had an alternate APN you could use that gave you direct access to the internet, and an externally facing IP address. I only discovered this last month and the network is being shut down this year. It's such a pity this isn't a standard feature.

Edit: Apparently it is possible. (1)

1: http://forums.overclockers.com.au/showpost.php?p=9968987&...

Optus resellers will give you public IP addresses by default and the high end ones can get you static IPs too.

Yes I realise there are a lot of reasons for networks to block this kind of functionality. Such a shame!

Would be nice if they gave you an Internet facing IPv6 address by default, but default firewall rules that blocked incoming connections, and the ability to modify those rules for your connection only.

But I guess that would only be valuable if they also gave you a static IP. And static IPs for client devices like phones aren't exactly a good thing from a privacy perspective. Ideally you'd have both a dynamic and a static IP, and new outgoing connections would originate from the dynamic one.

But I guess that would only be valuable if they also gave you a static IP.

Why? That's what (Dynamic) DNS is for.

I wouldn't want to run a Web server or SMTP server on Dynamic DNS. The delays introduced by DNS cache when your IP changes provide an opportunity for somebody else to intercept/replace your traffic. Although I admit that is pretty unlikely.

With a very low TTL and using HTTPS (which binds to the domain, not the IP), the chances are slim to none.

My Nexus S on T-Mobile in the US has IPv6 already.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/symmetricalism/7110449061/

I get no ipv6 connectivity on my sgh989 (tmobile usa ver of galaxys2) when on 4g (turning off wifi). On wifi, I get ipv6 (local net has ipv6 connectivity).

Could it be regional... T-Mobile enabling ipv6 for some cities and not others? Or perhaps the current tmobile firmware (mine is 2.3.6, T989, UVKL1) for their sgh989 disables ipv6 for the gsm/utms portion of the radio.

It requires that your baseband support IPv6 and that you have the T-Mobile APN in Android configured to IPv6-only (it will tunnel IPv4 over IPv6).

Android phones on Verizon's LTE network get a global IPv6 address by default. Their firewall prevents unsolicited incoming traffic though. Not sure about AT&T LTE.

What's needed to have IPv6 support? Hosting with IPv6 support, right?

- A domain name with working AAAA records

- Your site reachable over IPv6

And possibly:

- Any software packages (Wordpress, phpBB, etc.) working correctly with IPv6

Does apache default to IPv6 support?

A DNS server which serves your zone available over IPv6 would also be nice.

Ooh, that too. That would be ironic if it wasn't.

CloudFlare provides a IPv6 -> IPv4 gateway. As a result, if you're on CloudFlare, your host doesn't need to have IPv6 support for your site to be available. You can enable the gateway for free. CloudFlare's DNS listens on IPv6 and will return a valid AAAA record when requested. If your host supports IPv6 then the connection is IPv6 end-to-end. If your host only supports IPv4 then the connection is IPv6 from the browser to CloudFlare's network, and then IPv4 from CloudFlare's network to your origin server. Here's more on how it works:

http://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-cloudflares-automatic...

Oh and there was me thinking that this was an attempt to produce an alternate replacement for ipv6 that is designed with migration in mind rather than the ivory tower OSI style standard it became.

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