Month: August 2008

ipv6, long way to go

I think the first time i saw IPv6 on the Internet was in the late nineties on IRC, when it was cool to have a hostname like 3ffe:1337::dead:babe. A few years later i tried out freenet6 but stopped using it, when most of the IRC servers k-lined freenet6 because of script kiddies abusing it. IRC was and maybe still is the only IPv6 killer application.
Since 2005 i have been using sixxs.net and started using IPv6 on my LAN. If i can trust the gif-interface counters my sixxs.net tunnel currently transfers about 70MB/day, while the IPv4 interface claims to transfer about 300MB/day.
I recently converted not only this webserver but also the kde-freebsd Teams’ development host to ipv6only. I did not expect this to be a big deal, as all people having accounts on it are unix geeks. I was quite surprised that more than half of the users did not have any ipv6 experience.
Another datapoint is freefall.freebsd.org, a system accessed by unix hackers only. According to netstat there are currently 43 tcp4 ssh sessions and only 10 tcp6 sessions,
Even worse, of these 10 sessions three are freebsd.org-LAN sessions and 2 are from my systems.
So if you have something interesting to offer on the internet, shut down your IPv4 interface.

Webserver moved

If you can read this, the move has been successfull.
I have decided to move to euserv.de. The new webserver has more RAM and a better CPU. Unfortunately Euserv.de charges 10EUR/month for 6 additional ip addresses. So i decided it is time for IPv6.
Although IPv6 has been around for quite some time, there are still some rough edges:
FreeBSD jails IPv6 support requires a patch from Björn Zeeb.
For access via legacy IPv4 i wanted to use lighttpd with mod_proxy, but mod_proxy does not support fetching IPv6-content yet, the following hack is required.
What i still have to think about is aggregated content, like the planet or the weather-plugin. There are way too many sites out there, that don’t support IPv6. (Hello twitter, last.fm, weather.noaa.gov). Possible solutions are NAT, a webproxy, or i have to put the aggregated content somewhere else.