World IPv6 Day: Solving the IP Address Chicken-and-Egg Challenge

facebook.com

24 points·Anon84··7 comments

This seems very cool, neat that these companies are taking this upon themselves.

That said, does anyone know the potential risks to these companies for this? I personally tried the facebook IPv6 site and it doesn't work. Are there going to be users who are unable to use these sites on this day?

The risk is that ~0.001% of computers won't be able to access Facebook or Google for one day because they think they have working IPv6 but they actually don't.

Since I can't access the v6 version of facebook, does that mean that I'm in the 0.001%?

Not necessarily; if your computer doesn't have IPv6 and knows that it doesn't have IPv6 then you're going to be fine.

The risk is much smaller today than it was when the ipv6 whitelists for google, etc were originally set up. All patched modern operating systems and browsers have corrected the behavior that originally caused this (preferring automatic v6 tunnels over native v4) so that the only brokenness remaining in theory is outdated software and improperly configured manual tunnels.

See http://fud.no/ipv6/ for more information on measurements of this issue as browsers and oses fixed this problem.

It's wonderful to see some leadership here. Don't miss the IPv6 address they have... 2620:0:1cfe:face:b00c::3

Funny (though predictable) that they didn't explicitly state the number 1 downside of large scale NAT: the inability to have a server at home.

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