Reassured by a relatively smooth test of IPv6 last week, some Web sites are choosing to keep servers available over the next-generation Internet technology.
And that's good news for an Internet that's bursting at the seams. The results of the test, called World IPv6 Day, may help encourage others to make the IPv6 upgrades.
In the test, a number of organizations broadcast that their servers were available on IPv6. That meant anybody who had an IPv6 Internet connection would get that version of the server rather than the usual IPv4 one.
"There is a great sense of relief that nothing bad happened," said Alain Durand, director of software engineering at network equipment Juniper Networks and a former IPv6 leader at Comcast and Sun Microsystems. "It's a big sense now that IPv6 is a mature technology that is ready to be deployed."
Internet Protocol version 6 solves what has become a significant limitation of the present IPv4 technology: a dearth of new IP addresses that devices need to exchange information over the Internet.
A small fraction of people--well under a tenth of a percent by several estimates--have network configuration problems that broke access to IPv6 sites on the Internet. But the test went well enough that IPv6 is here to stay.
For example, Google decided to keep the main YouTube.com site available over IPv6. And Facebook concluded it will continue to offer the IPv6 version of its Facebook developer site. And according to data from RIPE, the European organization that doles out IP addresses, others leaving their IPv6 services on at least for the time being include Sprint, Mozilla, and BBN Technologies.
Comcast, one of the largest U.S. Internet service providers, also participated in the test. It's been ramping up its own trials of IPv6 for customers, too: this month it began testing IPv6-based e-mail services and expanded IPv6 trials to San Francisco, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Miramar, Fla.
And to help people fix problems they may encounter, Microsoft and Apple offered new help pages. Consumer network equipment maker D-Link also is offering IPv6 troubleshooting help.
All of this activity indicates progress in dealing with the chicken-and-egg problem that has been IPv6. Ironing out the wrinkles is one thing, but providing content such as YouTube videos over IPv6 will provide an incentive for those who operate the Internet's networking equipment to start handling the IPv6 traffic properly and link up with each other.
"If all goes well...content can go to IPv6, and access can follow," said Lorenzo Colitti, Google's IPv6 guru, in a presentation about World IPv6 Day (PDF).
IPv6 follows on from the present IPv4 technology, which provides only 4.3 billion IP addresses. That may sound like a lot of addresses, but it turns that people want to attach a lot of servers, PCs, phones, tablets, smart meters, automobiles, TVs, video game consoles, and home broadband network routers to the Internet. And until recently, moving to IPv6 was largely optional, so few bothered with IPv6's expense and difficulty.
Computer administrators could postpone IPv6 transitions because technology such as network address translation (NAT) let home broadband users, Internet service providers, and corporations share a single IPv4 address among multiple devices. There are drawbacks to NAT, but the approach lets people get more use out of IPv4.
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