A global trial of IPv6 is scheduled for June 8th 2011. Google (GOOG), Facebook, Yahoo (YHOO), and Akamai (AKAM) will reportedly take part in the IPv6 “test flight.” The Internet Society, a non-profit group that educates people and companies about net issues is coordinating World IPv6 Day. Those who sign up for the test will make their pages available via IPv6 for 24 hours to help iron out problems created by the switch to the new addressing scheme.
IPv6 good news
“By providing an opportunity for the internet industry to collaborate to test IPv6 readiness we expect to lay the groundwork for large-scale IPv6 adoption and help make IPv6 ready for prime time,” said Leslie Daigle, chief Internet technology officer at the Internet Society in a statement.
“The good news is that internet users don’t need to do anything special to prepare for World IPv6 Day,” said Lorenzo Colitti, a network engineer at Google in a blog post. “Our current measurements suggest that the majority (99.95%) of users will be unaffected. However, in rare cases, users may experience connectivity problems, often due to misconfigured or misbehaving home network devices.”
According to Google, Vint Cerf, the program manager for the ARPA Internet research project chose a 32-bit address format for an experiment in packet network interconnection in 1977. For more than 30 years, 32-bit addresses have served us well, but now the Internet is running out of space. IPv6 is the only long-term solution, but it has not yet been widely deployed. In November 2010 Mr. Cerf, one of the driving forces behind Google’s IPv6 efforts warned that the net faced “turbulent times” if it did not move quickly to adopt IPv6.
rb-
It will be interesting to see the number of participants. This all may just blow over the top because not enough of the right people in organizations see the need. I spoke to my Boss about this a while ago and I think one phone call has been made to our upstream ISP to see what they are doing. We probably won’t deal with it until there is a need for a point-to-point IP video conference with China or something and when it won’t work, then it is a crisis that gets addressed.
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- What Your Business Can Expect on World IPv6 Day (pcworld.com)
Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.