Happy World IPv6 Day!

With just an hour or so left to go on World IPv6 Day, I have to say, that I’m surprised – and a bit happy – that more fuss hasn’t been made over it. After all, “hassle” has been a big reason why transitioning to IPv6 – which has been “imminent” for the last five or six years – has so far moved at a glacial pace.

But to be truthful, I’d forgotten that today was the day, until I was back from lunch and rummaging around for a blog post. That tells me that the worst fears of implementers – that deploying IPv6 will somehow cause widespread disruption of the Internet – aren’t going to come true.

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But sometimes, publicity gets in the way of serious work. Had anyone at the Internet Society (ISOC) or elsewhere made a bigger fuss over this day of walking on the wild side, it’s likely that consumer media would have blown the event all out of proportion. Nevertheless, this appears to have been a successful test so far. As of 3pm Pacific, over 90 percent of total participants were reachable over IPv6 from ISOC’s UK-based servers, and almost 95 percent of participants were announcing IPv6 DNS (AAAA) records. When Akamai, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo can spend the day running an IPv6 test flight on their production networks, and nobody notices, you know it’s a big deal no matter how soft the publicity campaign.

Barring something really awful happening by the end of the day, I’d call World IPv6 Day a huge success. The next step is to set up a trial that lasts for longer than a day. But with every week that passes, the pool of unused IPv4 addresses gets smaller, and time is running out. Will 2012 be the year that major Internet forces cut over to the next-generation networking technology?