Today was a pretty historic event for the internet. Today was the day a number of large providers (Including Facebook, Google, Yahoo! and the BBC) enabled IPv6 on their customer facing websites as a test flight for the next generation internet. Sadly the company I work for wasn’t one of these who could make it to World IPv6 day, but my team are busy enabling our global backbone for IPv6… For providers above a certain size its actually a pretty lengthy process to weed out all of the old technology such as that last Cisco CSS load balancer or local director you are still using (or 100′s in our case) and move onto technology which supports things from the last century! Even things like contacting all of your IPv4 peers (We have 800+ peering sessions – and thats not a large number) to ask them to setup a IPv6 session too… and your transits… thankfully our friends at Level3 and Abovenet are fully native (now) so thats all good. There are thankfully other helpful providers out there like Hurricane Electric who are trying very hard to get everyone going with IPv6.
Thankfully days like today are adding enough weight to the case. People are listening and starting to realise that just because they have plenty of IPv4 left, it doesn’t mean that they shouldn’t do something about IPv6 too! I’ve read many posts relating to $large_cable_provider_in_uk who say they have enough IPv4 addresses and so won’t worry for now thanks. Thats a pretty daft attitude to the situation… but then maybe thats just me. I’ve been IPv6 native at home for the last couple of years (Thanks to a combination of Goscomb Technologies and Andrews & Arnold), and my public facing web servers for longer (Thanks to Poundhost). This blog infact is IPv6 native every day… not just on World IPv6 day!
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