World IPv6 Day: Largest Ever Experiment in the History of Internet

World IPv6 Day is a large-scale experiment in the history of Internet to find problems associated with IPv6, a version of IP designed to succeed IPv4.

More than 400 organizations are participating today in the World IPv6 Day, a large-scale experiment to find problems associated with IPv6, a version of the Internet Protocol (IP) designed to succeed Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4). World IPv6 Day is an event sponsored and organized by the Internet Society and several large content providers to test public IPv6 deployment. It started today at 00:00 UTC on June 8, 2011 and will end 23:59 the same day.

World IPv6 Day is the largest-ever experiment in the Internet’s 40-year history. The test will primarily consist of websites publishing AAAA records, allowing IPv6 capable hosts to connect using IPv6. The goal of the event is to quantify issues such as mis-configured gear that will create broken connections for some users of IPv6.

Ipv6_address_leading_zeros

World IPv6 Day participants have added AAAA (“quad A”) records holding IPv6 addresses to their domain name (DNS) servers, in addition to the normal A (for “address”) records that exist for IPv4 addresses. This makes the DNS servers “dual stack,” having both IPv4 and IPv6 connectivity.

World IPv6 Day

“We’re ready,” says Cricket Liu, vice president of architecture at Infoblox, a World IPv6 Day participant. “We’ve got the IPv6 address on the Webserver and the name server. … The point of World IPv6 Day to uncover issues and to prepare for a day when we do have much broader IPv6 adoption.”

“This is a test flight. It’s been clear from the beginning that we’re expecting problems,” says Andy Champagne, vice president of engineering at Akamai, a content delivery network that carriers anywhere from 15% to 30% of the Internet’s traffic and a World IPv6 Day participant. “I don’t think I remember an event where we have had so many different companies working together to fix a problem. We have folks who are usually staunch competitors sharing information.”

Google, one of the participants has described how this will work here.

Many of the Internet’s biggest companies are participating in World IPv6 Day, including:

  • Popular websites such as Google, Facebook, Yahoo and Bing.
  • ISPs such as Comcast, Time Warner, AT&T and Verizon.
  • Network equipment vendors such as Cisco, Juniper, Blue Coat and Radware.
  • Software giants such as Microsoft, Mozilla and Nominum.
  • Other participants include universities such as Rensellaer Polytechnic Institute, government agencies including the Federal Aviation Administration, and tech industry groups such as the W3C.

You can test your IPv6 readiness by visiting these pages:

IPv6 Test page 1IPv6 Test page 2IPv6 Test Mirrors List

Have a happy World IPv6 Day! Don’t forget to share with us about your experience with IPv6.

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