The Google over IPv6 program allows ISPs with good connectivity to request IPv6 access for most Google services. In about a week, we’ll be adding Google App Engine and the appspot.com domain to this program. This means that all App Engine apps will become accessible over IPv6 to anyone participating in the program!

For most people, this won’t require any changes to your code at all. If your App Engine code reads os.environ["REMOTE_ADDR"] in Python, or HttpServletRequest.getRemoteAddr() in Java, be aware that this value may be an IPv4 address, like “192.0.2.1″, or an IPv6 address, like “2001:db8::1″. Now is the time to verify that your code doesn’t make any IPv4-specific assumptions, so that your IPv6-ready users will have a seamless transition.

More info on http://googleappengine.blogspot.com

IPv6 Query is one of the very first iPhone applications that can resolve IPv6 Addresses. Because the high level iPhone SDK classes provided by Apple do not support IP version 6, they can not resolve host names. IPv6 Quert uses C to resolve DNS instead of the Cocoa
classes that refuse to return IPv6 addresses.

The app created by infinitycg will let you test host names for IPv6 support and also provides reference material.

The app costs $0.99 in Itunes and can be found under the Utilities categorie

Today we have a Q&A with Joost Tholhuijsen. Joost is the owner of Tholhuijsen Consultancy and an active member of the Dutch IPv6-Taskforce.

Please tell us a little about Tholhuijsen Consultancy

Tholhuijsen Consultancy assists medium and large organisations in network
migrations. We help international companies in selecting their WAN vendor
and solution, we lead IP renumbering projects and advise in broader IT
infrastructure issues.

When and how did IPv6 began to be a part of Tholhuijsen Consultancy?

Tholhuijsen Consultancy started to orientate on IPv6 in 1999, and in 2002
met with Vint Cerf on the subject. In 2009 IPv6 was adopted as one of the
main activities of Tholhuijsen Consultancy. For Syntens, an initiative of
the Dutch Minisitry of Economic Affairs we developed and IPv6 Workshop for
decision makers in small and medium Enterprises.

What is the current status of IPv6 at Tholhuijsen Consultancy?

Tholhuijsen Consultancy has its infrastructure running native IPv6 and
tunneled IPv6. To properly test the market situation one of the networks is
even native IPv6 only. And But Tholhuijsen Consultancy does see IPv6 not
only as part of it’s infrastructure, but more as part of its core business.
Training, creating practical awareness, creating information material and
advising and assisting in IPv6 integration are our day to day work. Via
www.ipv6specialisten.nl Tholhuijsen Consultancy strives to make practical
and skilled IPv6 specialists active in the market.

In what way do you expect to see IPv6 growth in the next couple of years for Tholhuijsen Consultancy?

Tholhuijsen Consultancy is a member of the Dutch IPv6 Task Force, which
foundation was commissioned by the Ministry of Economic Affairs in 2005. The
general purpose of the Task Force is to promote the adoption of IPv6. The
Task Force however has limited means to fullfill its role. Internationally
and nationally outside the official IPv6 promotional bodies number of
initiatives arise. Some important web-sites like Google and YouTube see it
as their responsibility to promote IPv6, and have made their sites IPv6
reachable. Others like Ebay’s Marktplaats strive to do so on a short term.
We expect that initiatives like these help in breaking the infamous
chicken-egg situation that some see as the main barrier for IPv6. Awareness
of the coming IPv4 shortage is rising, but even in the top 20 of best
visited web-sites in February 2010 it was still not at 100 per cent.

Are there any things you would like to say about IPv6 in general?

ICT infrastructures are run by people with broad responsibilities.
Stakeholders are users, management and last but not least controllers.
Implementing IPv6 is not trivial for all of these parties. The speed in
which IPv6 is adopted for this reason does not follow the aspirations of
IETF, IANA, ISOC etc. at the pace of these parties. Given that fact that
IPv6 is necessary, mature and promising, the point of no-return for IPv6 has
been passed some time ago, and organisations ignoring IPv6 might ignore
their role in the mid-term future.

Thank you for your time and your answers Joost and we hope to hear more of your work in the future.

mDNSResponder, used for all DNS queries in Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, has a strange behavior when it comes to query DNS records.
It will simultaneously ask for a A and a AAAA record when performing a DNS lookup but will be only using the first response and will reject any further responses with a “port unreachable”.

For example. You are using a dual stack client and want to browse to a dual stack website. The mDNSResponder will send a A and a AAAA request. The DNS server will respond to both queries but the client only uses the responds that it receives first. If for example the A record is received first you will be using a IPv4 connection even though you are dual stacked.

Stuart Cheshire gave a presentation on IPv6 adoption at the IETF 72 Technical Plenary. In that presentation he explains the motivation behind this double query.

Initially, from a end user perspective, it is a nice idea that could have its benefits, but if you look u bit further it has many downsides to it. Some are: Harder to debug on your network. DNS servers get twice as much queries. It will not work when your client is on a IPv6-only network and, even more troubling, if you only have a AAAA record the responds to the A record request will result in a NXDOMAIN and the client thinks the domain doesn’t exist.

So be aware of this behavior when working with MacOS X 10.6 (and perhaps other Apple products) and keep an eye on the bug report.

A list of the most popular Dutch websites according to Alexa.com. We left out the websites that are not from the Netherlands.

There are 6 websites that are reachable by IPv6. But only 3 are dualstack on the main domainname. These websites are www.geenstijl.nl, www.spitsnieuws.nl and www.spele.nl.

Two of the 3 websites with dualstack IPv6 are hosted by Prolocation that offer IPv6 connectivity by their IPv6 Proxy

We will keep checking the list to see if more websites become reachable by IPv6.

The list:

Website	IPv6 on Domain	IPv6 on Subdomain	URL
hyves.nl
nu.nl
marktplaats.nl
telegraaf.nl			http://www.ipv6.telegraaf.nl
ing.nl
startpagina.nl
nos.nl
rabobank.nl
dumpert.nl
abnamro.nl
bol.com
funda.nl
tweakers.net
rtl.nl
geenstijl.nl			http://www.geenstijl.nl
fok.nl
buienradar.nl			http://www.buienradar.nl/
spele.nl			http://www.spele.nl
tvgids.nl
spitsnieuws.nl			http://www.spitsnieuws.nl
detelefoongids.nl
vi.nl
ad.nl
omroep.nl
nusport.nl
partyflock.nl
volkskrant.nl
upc.nl
web-log.nl
wehkamp.nl
ns.nl
ebay.nl
beslist.nl
kieskeurig.nl
anwb.nl
speurders.nl			http://www.ipv6.speurders.nl
9292ov.nl
uitzendinggemist.nl
voetbalzone.nl
nrc.nl
kpn.com
xs4all.nl			http://www.ipv6.xs4all.nl
knmi.nl
t-mobile.nl
dvhn.nl
belastingdienst.nl
nujij.nl
ah.nl
vodafone.nl

In this Q&A session were talking to Robin Elfrink, Robin is a Network Engineer at the Dutch ISP Introweb. And he will tell us about Introweb and their intrest in IPv6.

Please tell us a little about Introweb

Introweb was founded in 1995 as a subsidiary of electronics and security company. We provide connectivity (DSL and fiber), hosting and services as a package, specializing in high-availability and continuity. Introweb has about 35 employees. The way Introweb works has already resulted in a ISO27001 certification.

When and how did IPv6 began to be a part of Introweb?

We got our IPv6 prefix just before 2004, and have since been working to gain experience with it.

What is the current status of IPv6 at Introweb?

About three years ago we started to implement IPv6 in our backbone to
any equipment that supports it. Barring a single switch, our entire
network infrastructure is now IPv6-aware. When buying new equipment we
require IPv6 capabilities.

To promote the use of IPv6 by our clients, we offer a native IPv6 ADSL
connection for the symbolic amount of EUR (IPv) 6,- per month.

http://www.introweb.net/producten/categorien/internet_toegang/economy_adsl/ipv6_adsl.shtml

In what way do you expect to see IPv6 growth in the next couple of years for Introweb?

We see that more companies are experimenting with IPv6. We encourage
that, but it is difficult to quantify expectations. We are certainly ready.

Are there any things you would like to say about IPv6 in general?

There will be a moment in the not too distant future that parts of the
internet will be accessible only over IPv6. When that happens you’d
better be ready.

Thanks Robin for your time to anwser our questions! Keep up the good work!

A few hours ago Opera released the final of Opera 10.50. With this release Opera has fixed a big IPv6 problem.
In previous releases the Opera webbrowser unconditionally preferred IPv6 over IPv4, even if the IPv6 connection was for example a Terredo connection. With this new release Opera complies with RFC3484 and only prefers IPv6 if that connection is native.

The effect that this bug had has been made available by Tore Anderson by including 1×1 pixels over dual stack and IPv4-only on a high traffic website located in Norway. In his latest Februari report there is a IPv6 brokenis of 0.094% and if you exclude Opera it’s 0.029%. Reports are available for October, November, December, Januari and Februari.

Some websites, including Google, don’t offer a AAAA DNS record because of this small portion of customers (but many users if you are a large content provider) they would lose when introducing a AAAA record. Instead they offer something like ipv6.domain.com or in the case of Google set up a whitelist program.  Opera, like most browser, offers upgrades without intervention of the user so this new release should be adopted soon by Opera users. Let’s hope this will inspire content providers to include AAAA records without any limitations. The browsers are ready.

Thanks to Tore Anderson for making these reports available.

Joost Tholhuijsen has posted a nice article about the current IPv6 plans of the top 20 Dutch websites.
Only two sites (Google and Youtube) have there content enabled for the the new Internet protocol. The most websites that are in the top 20 are testing IPv6 or making preparation to do so. A few sites didn’t had any plans to deploy IPv6 or weren’t available for comment.

Read the full article (Dutch).

Four months ago we reported that the AMS-IX achieved 2 Gbps of IPv6 traffic. Since then there hasn’t been much growth of IPv6 traffic at AMS-IX.
The Gemand Internet Exchange (DE-CIX) however has seen a steady increase of IPv6 traffic (as well as IPv4) these last few weeks and as of today broke the 2 Gbps barrier with 2.14 Gbps of IPv6 traffic.

The total peak traffic at DE-CIX today was 1240.4 Gbps of which 2.14 Gbps was IPv6, that is 0.172%. These days the AMS-IX also has 0.172% of IPv6 traffic, this is unfortunately less the the 0.285% we reported back in October 2009.

We are running our very popular 4 day Implementing IPv6 training course in London UK in April. This course covers all elements of IPv6 in detail. It is suitable for network managers, systems administrators and technologists who require in depth coverage of IPv6. The course includes comprehensive exercises that cover all aspects of IPv6.

For further details please see the course description at Implementing IPv6. If you wish to book on the course then contact us using this Contact Form.