Wed 8 June: World IPv6 Day

On 8 June, 2011, Google, Facebook, Yahoo!, Akamai and Limelight Networks will be amongst some of the major organisations that will offer their content over IPv6 for a 24-hour “test flight”. The goal of the Test Flight Day is to motivate organizations across the industry – Internet service providers, hardware makers, operating system vendors and web companies – to prepare their services for IPv6 to ensure a successful transition as IPv4 addresses run out. (source: World IPv6 day)

I'm happy to announce that aprs.fi is also taking part in this experiment, where IPv6 support is suddenly enabled for a large amount of high-profile web sites. Please note that IPv4 support will not be disabled during the experiment. I'm only adding the IPv6 AAAA DNS records for the main aprs.fi site, instead of having it as a separate entry on ipv6.aprs.fi.

If you find that aprs.fi stops working for you on Wednesday (give or take a day to allow for timezone differences), you'll also soon find a large number of other sites not working. Your network operator's network does not support web sites which provide service to both IPv4 and IPv6 users. According to statistics made by Wikimedia on the Wikipedia site, this will hit about 0.3% of users. If you happen to belong to this group, it's important for your network operator to realize that this will eventually become a permanent situation. Your network needs a little fixing.

You can prepare for the World IPv6 day by visiting one of these two testing sites: simple "OMG" version and verbose.

More information about the event on the World IPv6 day site. Happy IPv6 day, everyone!