EBT over IPv6

[avij]

EBT will be participating in the World IPv6 day on June 8th. On that day, many major websites will enable IPv6 on their websites for 24 hours to see if people have problems connecting to websites which have both IPv4 and IPv6 enabled. The Wikipedia article may also be informative.

Most of you should be able to access EBT just fine on that day. However, if you're one of those few unfortunate persons who have misconfigured routers or operating systems, you might not be able to access EBT on that day. You can check your readiness using test-ipv6.com. If you see the text No problems are anticipated for you with this browser, at this location you'll be fine. Another useful test site is at ipv6eyechart.ripe.net.

If you have problems connecting to www.eurobilltracker.com on that day, please let us know so we may assist you in fixing your settings. forum.eurobilltracker.com will remain IPv4-only on that day, so you can use the forum to voice your concerns. ARIN's wiki page has a lot of suggestions on how to fix things.

(wap/api/m).eurobilltracker.com will also be IPv6-enabled on that day. As a backup for all those who need to e.g. enter at least one note per day, the deprecated domain name eurobilltracker.eu will remain IPv4-only on that day.

[avij]

[technical stuff]

If you are a technically-minded person AND have an IPv6 address (either native or tunneled), you can try using EBT over IPv6 even before the main IPv6 day. This is accomplished by using 188.124.15.163 and 188.124.15.164 as your name servers. It's actually just one name server which happens to have two IP addresses. That name server will serve only AAAA records when queried about eurobilltracker.com. This is unlike the World IPv6 day configuration, when the official name servers of EBT will respond with both A and AAAA records. If you're running your own name server, you can also forward the queries for the eurobilltracker.com zone to the above name servers. Please note that this temporary name server will be disabled at the end of the year. It's recommended to restore your previous DNS server settings after you're done testing.

If you know you have IPv6 connectivity and have problems connecting to eurobilltracker.com after making the above change to your configuration, please let me know so the problem can be fixed. If you don't know if you have IPv6 connectivity, try accessing ipv6.miuku.net. If you can reach that page and it tells you your IPv6 address (like 2001:1bc818::1:101), you have IPv6 connectivity.

An alternative way to get EBT over IPv6 is to add a line 2001:1bc818::1:101 en.eurobilltracker.com (where 'en' is the language code, substitute your own code appropriately) to your /etc/hosts or equivalent. This method hasn't been extensively tested, but it's considered to be the traditional method for overriding DNS data.

If you screw up your DNS server addresses and can't remember the proper original values and can't get them back with DHCP, the IP addresses of Google's DNS servers are easy to remember: 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4.

Unfortunately our ISP doesn't yet offer native IPv6 addresses, so EBT over IPv6 had to be implemented a bit differently. We're running HAProxy on a nearby IPv6-enabled server, which forwards the requests to EBT over IPv4.

www.eurobilltracker.com/util/ipaddress.php will tell you if you're using IPv4 or IPv6 to access EBT (or actually, you should replace www with your language code, such as de).

[/technical stuff]

[avij]

The IPv6 address was added last night and will be removed again in about 16 hours. The purpose of this experiment is to see if there are any problems with eurobilltracker.com having both an IPv4 and IPv6 address. If there are no problems, it's likely that EBT will start using both the IPv4 and IPv6 addresses permanently.

[MDeen]

An alternative way to get EBT over IPv6 is to add a line 2001:1bc818::1:101 eurobilltracker.com to your /etc/hosts or equivalent. This method hasn't been extensively tested, but it's considered to be the traditional method for overriding DNS data.

I'm not sure if that works. I've added this to my /etc/hosts:
2001:1bc818::1:101 en.eurobilltracker.com http://www.eurobilltracker.com" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false; eurobilltracker.com

When I ping6 one of these addresses it works fine (and ping6 eurobilltracker.com does go to en.eurobilltracker.com), browsing works too and I get the eurobilltrackerpage.
But when I browse to the address http://[2001:1bc818::1:101]" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;, I get a status page from leopardi.miuku.net:

About

* leopardi.miuku.net is a server maintained by Anssi Johansson

Hardware

* Dell PowerEdge 2950
* Intel Xeon X5355 2.66GHz quad-core CPU
* 2x Fujitsu 146GB 15krpm SAS hot-swappable hard disks
* 2x Seagate Cheetah NS.2 450GB 10krpm SAS hot-swappable hard disks
* 8x 4GB (total 32GB) Kingston FB-DIMM memory sticks
* DVD drive
* 2x 700W hot-swappable power supplies

Services

Etc.

So: IPv6 does work, but I don't think it works by adding the address in /etc/hosts.

[avij]

So: IPv6 does work, but I don't think it works by adding the address in /etc/hosts.

Hm, I assumed that it'd suffice to assign an IPv6 address for eurobilltracker.com, as all the other subdomains (en.eurobilltracker.com etc) just point to eurobilltracker.com. This may not have been the case, my bad.

But If you add "2001:1bc818::1:101 en.eurobilltracker.com" to /etc/hosts the operating system would most probably obey that setting if it wants to know the IPv6 address for en.eurobilltracker.com. The resolve order (/etc/hosts, DNS, something else) is somewhat implementation/configuration specific, so there can be some variations in behaviour. It also appears that having an IPv6 address for en.eurobilltracker.com in /etc/hosts does not prevent the system from looking up the IPv4 address using other methods, if an application requests an IPv4 address for some host. So if your browser or operating system prefers IPv4 addresses over (possibly tunneled) IPv6 addresses, there's a good chance that when you browse to en.eurobilltracker.com, the browser actually uses IPv4 to connect to EBT even if there's an IPv6 entry for en.eurobilltracker.com in /etc/hosts.

As far as the World IPv6 day is concerned, this is relatively irrelevant. As long as you can access EBT using some protocol, everything's fine.

Yes, accessing the server by the IPv6 address gives that page, but it does the same for IPv4 as well: http://80.69.163.42/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false; -- this works as designed.

[MDeen]

I'm also not quite clear on what I need to do to get my IPv6 working properly. Well, it is working, but I don't think my webserver accepts IPv6 connections yet.

[avij]

Alright, the IPv6 day is over and the IPv6 address for eurobilltracker.com has been removed. If you experienced any problems connecting to EBT (or Google, Facebook, Youtube or some other participating site) yesteday I'd be very interested in hearing about them. Otherwise it's likely that EBT will start using IPv6 permanently after the dust has settled down a bit.

[avij]

OK, I think we can proceed with the final IPv6 rollout. We'll be doing this gradually to make sure there are no surprises. As we have a lot of hostnames, making the changes one or a few hostnames at a time seems the most appropriate. The schedule for enabling IPv6 for each of the hostnames is:

ns-de, ns-fi, ns-fr (name servers) -- already IPv6-enabled
en -- 8.10.
fi -- 15.10.
de -- 22.10.
nl -- 29.10.
fr, it -- 5.11.
es, pt -- 12.11.
all other languages except se -- 19.11.
se, m, wap -- 26.11.
www, api -- 3.12.
eurobilltracker.com, eurobilltracker.eu et al. -- 10.12.
forum -- 17.12.

The schedule is subject to changes. The information and links in the above messages are still relevant and correct, except that eurobilltracker.eu will no longer serve as a backup. If something doesn't work as expected after the switch, please let us know. If you have problems, please have a look at the links presented in the first message of this topic.

How does this affect me and my usage of EBT?
You should still be able to use EBT as usual, regardless of whether you have IPv6 or not. Only a few percent of users have IPv6 connectivity at this time, but its usage may grow over time. We just want to be ready for the new technology. If you have any concerns, see --edited--link-no-longer-valid--. It should tell you if your browser is configured correctly.

[aloxe]

Great, bravo avij for the effort that nobody will see. If you need any help for testing from a user in 2001:980:53b7:1:fa1e:dfff:fed6:ae60 don't hesitate to ask me in MP.

[village]

Great, bravo avij for the effort that nobody will see.

Except a few people. I noticed it today when I accessed de.eurobilltracker.com and en.eurobilltracker.com and saw the little IPv6 Address in my browser's status line
Maybe I only looked there after I experienced a few problems caused by roaming (logged in at home (IPv4 only), continued to use ebt @work (dual stack) from different address. Get me right: I don't blame EBT at all for this, just noticed it.

Thanks, avij - ebt will survive even if the world will run out of IPv4 addresses!

[avij]

Yeah, we're nearly done with the IPv6 rollout process. Next weekend eurobilltracker.com will get an AAAA record as well, and a few days later the various *.eurobilltracker.com CNAMEs will be changed to point at eurobilltracker.com instead of the current dualstack.eurobilltracker.com. If no problems show up, the forum will also get an IPv6 address on 17.12.

As you might imagine, the percentage of users who can access EBT over IPv6 is still quite low. Yesterday the percentage of registered EBT users who were able to use EBT over IPv6 was around 0.85%. For those who are interested, I'm collecting statistics about this (sadly the stats tool doesn't quite understand floating point numbers so it's still showing 0%).

[Crazy Bob]

I did some of the IPv6 tests, and it appears my computer and/or DSL-line and/or provider isn't / aren't ready for IPv6. Anything I can do about that myself (as a relative n00b)?

[avij]

I did some of the IPv6 tests, and it appears my computer and/or DSL-line and/or provider isn't / aren't ready for IPv6. Anything I can do about that myself (as a relative n00b)?

What kind of information test-ipv6.com gives you? Before trying to troubleshoot problems further, you might want to make sure you have installed all the relevant operating system and browser updates. http://www.getipv6.info/index.php/Custo ... ould_occur" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false; lists some possible solutions to the problems. Disabling 6to4 and Teredo according to the instructions on that page might help, along with disabling Internet Connection Sharing on your home network (if there's no need for it). If all else fails and the problems continue, disabling IPv6 altogether might be necessary. Instructions for that are at the bottom of the above GetIPv6.info page.

edit: The above was written with the assumption that you were having problems connecting to EBT and/or the tests said that you might be experiencing problems. If you simply don't have any kind of IPv6 connectivity (like most of us here), you might want to ask your internet service provider how to get IPv6.

[aloxe]

As you might imagine, the percentage of users who can access EBT over IPv6 is still quite low. Yesterday the percentage of registered EBT users who were able to use EBT over IPv6 was around 0.85%. For those who are interested, I'm collecting statistics about this (sadly the stats tool doesn't quite understand floating point numbers so it's still showing 0%).

This is much much better than Google (0.11%) and Yahoo (0.22%) during World IPv6 day!

[Crazy Bob]

I did some of the IPv6 tests, and it appears my computer and/or DSL-line and/or provider isn't / aren't ready for IPv6. Anything I can do about that myself (as a relative n00b)?

What kind of information test-ipv6.com gives you? Before trying to troubleshoot problems further, you might want to make sure you have installed all the relevant operating system and browser updates. http://www.getipv6.info/index.php/Custo ... ould_occur" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false; lists some possible solutions to the problems. Disabling 6to4 and Teredo according to the instructions on that page might help, along with disabling Internet Connection Sharing on your home network (if there's no need for it). If all else fails and the problems continue, disabling IPv6 altogether might be necessary. Instructions for that are at the bottom of the above GetIPv6.info page.

edit: The above was written with the assumption that you were having problems connecting to EBT and/or the tests said that you might be experiencing problems. If you simply don't have any kind of IPv6 connectivity (like most of us here), you might want to ask your internet service provider how to get IPv6.

Test results:

Your IPv4 address on the public Internet appears to be 1.2.3.4

No IPv6 address detected [more info]

World IPv6 day is June 8th, 2011. No problems are anticipated for you with this browser, at this location. [more info]

You appear to be able to browse the IPv4 Internet only. You will not be able to reach IPv6-only sites.

Your DNS server (possibly run by your ISP) appears to have no access to the IPv6 Internet, or is not configured to use it. This may in the future restrict your ability to reach IPv6-only sites. [more info]

Your readiness scores
10/10 for your IPv4 stability and readiness, when publishers offer both IPv4 and IPv6
0/10 for your IPv6 stability and readiness, when publishers are forced to go IPv6 only

So it doesn't look too good, I guess...