Web Operators Told to Prepare Help Desks for IPv6 Day Problems
Operators are expecting a wave of help desk calls from customers on World IPv6 Day June 8 because they will have difficulties reaching Google or Facebook that day, said Ruediger Volk, a Deutsche Telekom senior routing specialist. That day, several big content providers like Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Akamai and Limelight Networks will serve their sites over IPv6 numbers, alongside the currently used IPv4.
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While both versions will run nicely alongside for most users, some will be heavily slowed down or even be unable to reach either version of Google. For large providers and content providers, if even only 0.3-0.5 percent of users have problems that translates into six-digit numbers of problems. Help desks must be prepared, the experts said.
"If my mother cannot get to Google which is her start page, that matters”, said David Freedman, engineer at the ISP Claranet. Freedman said providers should have a “triage team” for the day, helped by automatic messages telling callers that major websites are participating in an experiment before offering direct support to those who want to go on.” Regardless of your size, or IPv6 maturity -- “your customers will have issues”, Freedman said.
Google engineer Lorenzo Colitti, preparing feverishly for the World IPv6 Day, said the goal is not to bring every access provider to IPv6 for that very day. “We want to find out about the broken users out there and fix it,” Colitti said. Problems mainly result from home routers that already have some IPv6 functionality and try to use IPv6 -- instead of the parallel running IPv4-version. When the IPv6 connection breaks due to broken connectivity or due to the router or another part in the home network not being fully IPv6 supportive, the connection fails. In better cases, the router falls back to IPv4, but users who just give up or retry can get stuck, or will have to chose sites that do not participate in the experiment for the day. “Possibly it will just be another day in the Internet,” Colitti said. Partial or temporary outages of some spots are not uncommon on the Internet as is, one expert said.
The goal of the “test flight” is to motivate ISPs, hardware makers, operating system vendors and web companies, to prepare their services for IPv6 in order to get closer to transition, said Andrei Robachevsky of the Internet Society.
One problem is that there may be too many transition mechanisms. “We have more transition mechanisms than IPv6 packets,” complained Randy Bush from the Internet Initiative Japan. “And many transition mechanisms do not help.” “We have had IPv6 commercially since 1997,” he said, “but for World IPv6 Day we have to shut it down.” The reason is that NTT is offering IPv6 only internally, “these addresses do not go anywhere."
The enormous variety of set-ups, hardware, software and transition mechanisms will be checked on World IPv6 Day and allow operators and content providers to decide on next steps in migration. Freedman said he would welcome it if some providers would keep their IPv6 sites open after the day in an effort to get more IPv6 traffic on the net. Users can beforehand check if they could run into problems at http://test-IPv6.com/, and third-party domains can be checked at http://go6.se/check/.