IPv6 foot-dragging

Wed May 11 17:27:59 UTC 2011

On May 11, 2011, at 1:12 PM, Iljitsch van Beijnum wrote:

> On 11 mei 2011, at 19:01, George Bonser wrote:
> 
>> A couple of things you can do to check.  First of all look for requests
>> to your DNS servers for AAAA records and note where those are coming
>> from.
> 
> Firefox has for a long time done both A and AAAA lookups even if the system doesn't have IPv6. I believe MacOS does this too, now. Don't know about other apps/OSes, but for sure you'll see tons of AAAA lookups from people who have no IPv6 connectivity.

It is still a way to measure it, even if it's not that accurate.

>> Then note who is arriving
>> over v6 asking for AAAA records.  Those are the best candidates for
>> enabling v6 services.
> 
> Now you're counting DNS servers. Because the provisioning of IPv6 DNS addresses has been such a mess and still is problematic, many dual stack systems do this over IPv4. And the DNS servers they talk to may be IPv4-only, or IPv4-only users may talk to dual stack DNS servers.
> 
> In my opinion, looking at this kind of stuff in order to draw conclusions about what you should do is a waste of time. It just means more work for everyone and it doesn't fix any of the broken stuff that's out there.
> 
> If the results of world IPv6 day are as we expect and only 0.1 - 0.2 % or less of all people have problems, I think the best way forward would be to have a second world IPv6 day where we again enable IPv6 industry-wide but this time we don't turn it off again.

I'd like to see a repeat but with a week timescale.  If you parse carefully, if all the $major sites are broken in the same way at the same time, it's easier to justify leaving it broken.  (eg: if Google, Yahoo and Bing all do IPv6 at once, neither has to worry about losing market share to the other due to misbehaving ipv6.  That's how I read igor's email about the 182k users, even if I still think we would be served with a longer test).

The most interesting data for me is looking at the sites that have 'majorly' broken IPv6 dns.  I count 600+ sites that are returning weird things like ::1 or ::ffff: addresses.  My favorites are the .gov site on the list and the city of albany.

Here's a pointer to the list:

http://puck.nether.net/~jared/aaaa/very-broken-dns.txt

- Jared