NANOG 40 agenda posted

Nathan Ward nanog at daork.net
Tue May 29 22:55:04 UTC 2007


On 30/05/2007, at 5:40 AM, Donald Stahl wrote:

>
>> How do you get mail.ipv6.yahoo.com to actually get *used*, when  
>> your average
>> user doesn't know where they set 'mail.yahoo.com' in their PC's  
>> configuration,
>> and either don't understand why sometimes's it's foo.com and  
>> sometimes it's
>> www.foo.com, or don't even bother, they just type 'foo' into the  
>> address bar
>> and let the browser add www. and .com, or they go to google and  
>> enter 'foo'
>> and hit "I feel lucky"?
> I don't want these sorts of people testing my systems with IPv6- I  
> want a technically savvy user who can offer me helpful feedback- at  
> least initially. Eventually- once I am sure the network is stable-  
> the service is stable, etc.- then you can add A and AAAA records  
> for the primary service.

I've got an idea that just fell out of my brain for web content  
providers to get a handle on their 'ipv6-ability' - how many eyeballs  
they would lose by adding www AAAA records.
Use Javascript, or flash, or some other fancy thing to do a GET for  
two files on two different servers as the page loads:
a) http://ip6test.<domain>/file
b) http://ip4test.<domain>/file

And then compare the hit-rate for the two. Perhaps also analyse  
things like X-Forwarded-For headers to see if HTTP proxies are being  
used, and so on.
Maybe an IPv4 POST happens with some kind of load time results, etc.

One could use a system like this to pop up a message to those who  
would become unreachable, and say "Follow these steps so that you can  
reach us next week when we turn on www AAAA records". Or perhaps,  
"Contact your ISP helpdesk for assistance".


My initial thought was "That means an additional GET per page, that  
means lots of server+network load!", but Yahoo! (for example) appears  
to do 35 requests for me to get their homepage, and the responses are  
all larger than 0b.


I'll have a hunt around and see if I can get Javascript/ 
XMLHTTPRequest to give me return codes as to why an HTTP GET failed  
(ie. unreachable, "host not found", etc.). If not, maybe Flash can do  
it.


Of course, has this sort of thing been done before?

--
Nathan Ward



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