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June 5, 2011

Google's IPv6 Test

As promised in January, Google will test IPv6 on June 8. IPv6 is the new version of the Internet Protocol which allows a lot more devices to connect to the Internet.

"Google has been supporting IPv6 since early 2008, when we first began offering search over IPv6. Since then we've brought IPv6 support to YouTube and have been helping ISPs enable Google over IPv6 by default for their users. On World IPv6 Day, we'll be taking the next big step. Together with major web companies such as Facebook and Yahoo!, we will enable IPv6 on our main websites for 24 hours. This is a crucial phase in the transition, because while IPv6 is widely deployed in many networks, it's never been used at such a large scale before."

Google expects that less than 0.5% of the users will be affected by the test. There's even a page that tests your connection and detects IPv6 connectivity issues. Even if IPv6 will be enabled for 24 hours, IPv4 will continue to be available.


{ via Blogoscoped Forum }

13 comments:

  1. I have IPv6 working perfectly fine, but the Google Test page indicates otherwise.
    When I do a DNS lookup on ipv6test.google.com and ipv6test.l.google.com, I cannot find an AAAA (IPv6) record; is the tool/site not yet active?

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  2. Nevermind - page reloads were successful.

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  3. In case you have not noticed, it looks like Google got Chrome a little more ready for IPv6 (my bet is that it was done in order to improve the network performance of Chrome for World IPv6 Day) with a special patch to Chrome 11 earlier -
    http://googlechromereleases.blogspot.com/2011/05/stable-channel-update_24.html

    "Have ConnectBackupJob try IPv4 first to hide potential long IPv6 connect timeout (Issue 81686)."

    (They usually do not fix bugs in stable release patches)

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  4. The testpage claims I seem to be ready, but IPv6.google.com won't load. Address cannot be found, FireFox 3.6, Chrome 13 and Opera 11.11 tell me.
    Nslookup returns an ipv6 address for the aaaa-record though...

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  5. same here, google test says i am ready but i cannot connect to IPv6.google.com, and for example page test-ipv6.com gives me 0/10 for ipv6

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  6. Their page http://ipv6test.google.com/ works fine in Firefox and Links, but I can't ping it. Both ping and ping6 say unknown host.

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  7. Correction, ping works but ping6 does not.

    bash-4.1$ ping6 ipv6test.google.com
    unknown host

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  8. You forgot to move DNS over to IPv6:

    vanrein@papageno$ dig ns1.google.com a
    ns1.google.com. 345267 IN A 216.239.32.10

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  9. You forgot to move DNS over to IPv6 (part 2):

    vanrein@papageno$ dig ns1.google.com aaaa
    google.com. 246 IN SOA ns1.google.com. dns-admin.google.com. 1452894 7200 1800 1209600 300

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  10. The link indicates that you are IPv6 ready.
    They just mean you will be able to access the site with IPv4 without problems, it doesn't mean your ISP lets you visit the site with IPv6.

    Some old computers might have problems with IPv6 addresses and that is probably the reason why they put the test page up.
    But like they said only 0.5% of the users should have this problem.

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  11. DNS is still broken voor ipv6test.google.com. No AAAA record.

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  12. To change IPv4 or IPv6 DNS easily use DnsJumper v1.0.5
    http://www.sordum.org/7952/dns-jumper-v1-0-5/

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