On 8th June, a number of major organisations will be offering their Internet content using the IPv6 protocol for a 24-hour ‘test flight’.  The goal of this day is to motivate organisations to prepare their services for IPv6, to ensure a successful transition as IPv4 addresses run out.

The University of Reading will be taking part in this event, offering the University’s web site via both IPv6 and IPv4 protocols.  We already have IPv6 enabled for a number of ‘behind the scenes’ services, including in- and out-bound email, Active Directory, and Domain Name Services (DNS).  The eduroam wireless network has also been issuing IPv6 addresses to clients for a number of months now.

As this is a world-wide event, some users may experience problems connecting to certain web sites (including Google and Yahoo) if their computers are not configured correctly.  There should not be any issue with University systems which are registered with IT Services and configured to use DHCP; or which use the correct DNS servers if manually configured.

For further detail on the event, see http://isoc.org/wp/worldipv6day/.  A full list of participants can be found at http://isoc.org/wp/worldipv6day/participants/

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2 Replies to “IPv6 test flight….”

  2. We are now running two ‘remote pollers’ to help with global statistics collection by the Internet Society (ISOC) and OpenNMS for World IPv6 day.

    There are pollers running at 66 locations globally, including at a handful of other JANET-connected institutions such as Loughborough, Cambridge and Edinburgh Unis.

    Each host, one at the Whiteknights Campus and one at the Greenlands Campus, will poll each of the following for around 300 hosts on the Internet on a rolling approximately ten minute cycle:

    * IPv4 and IPv6 ping
    * DNS A record
    * DNS AAAA record
    * HTTP IPv4 service
    * HTTP IPv6 service

    A summary graph will be created from the data we collect and presented on the main World IPv6 day page at http://www.worldipv6day.org/.

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