The big IPv6 experiment

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Jack

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Jan 24, 2011
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With more than 150 million page impressions per month, heise Online is one of the biggest news sites in Germany. Globally, it is also one of the largest sites now running in dual-stack mode, which means that pages can be accessed via both the conventional IPv4 and via the newer IPv6. The migration brought to light various interesting phenomena.

IPv6 has been considered the internet of the future for the past 15 years. However, people seem hesitant when it comes to fully embracing that future. All parties involved blame each other for the extremely slow start for IPv6. Most manufacturers of home routers hesitate while the number of IPv6 providers is still small. The providers say that the number of web sites accessible via IPv6 is still too small. The web site operators don't want to upgrade while they can still reach all internet users via IPv4.

And, understandably, internet users also aren't interested in IPv6; after all, it is a lower-level network protocol. Its creators deliberately designed it in such a way that all the levels above it work just as before. Users who look at any web site in their browsers today do not need to know anything about HTML. They need to know even less about the underlying HTTP, or the even lower TCP. So they need hardly care less about IPv4 or IPv6, which are yet another level below TCP.

For these reasons, IPv6 and IPv4 can easily be used in parallel. The browser doesn't care; it automatically loads the web page elements via the IP version that presents them, and then combines everything seamlessly when displaying a page. This "dual-stack mode" is the way forward for IPs; whether or when IPv4 will one day be "switched off" remains open. Until then, more and more computers will use both IPv4 and IPv6, unbeknown to their users.

The theory of this approach seems correct. Web sites only require a few technical changes to enable IPv6: servers have to be configured for IPv6, which is supported by all modern operating systems. Then the world needs to know about it – that is, a second DNS entry must link the name to the added IPv6 address.

And that's the exact procedure our German sister site at <!-- w --><a class="postlink" href="http://www.heise.de">www.heise.de</a><!-- w --> tested on the 16 September 2010. But why did heise online only test this configuration for a day, instead of enabling it permanently? There is one problem...


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