In place of a Q&A this week, I’d like to talk about an upcoming event. June 8, 2011 has been declared World IPv6 Day. The event, being led by Google, will see a handful of the Internet’s large websites enable Internet Protocol version 6. In theory most users won’t notice the difference and we’ll all be able to access Google, Facebook, Yahoo and others on June 8th, just like we would every other day.

But where theory meets practice there are often sparks, so it’s a good idea to see if your system is ready now. To help with that, there’s this test site. The site will test your system to see if you can reach IPv4 websites and IPv6 sites. It will also test to see if, assuming you can’t reach an IPv6 website, your web browser will properly fall-back to trying IPv4 in a reasonable amount of time. This last point is key because the proposed World IPv6 Day is less about moving everyone from the old protocol to the new one than it is about making sure websites will continue to function, regardless of which protocol is in use. In the past we’ve seen some websites, such as Google, provide separate IPv4 and IPv6 URLs in an effort to cater to both groups of users. Ideally websites should be able to offer one URL, regardless of client protocol. And, ideally, users should be able to connect to their favourite websites, regardless of which protocol they’re using.

For people who are currently on IPv4 (and that’s most of us), it is possible to set up a tunnel which allows access to IPv6 websites. Ubuntu’s website has a good article on creating an IPv6 tunnel when your computer is stuck with an IPv4 address. I recommend reading the article, which is fairly distro-neutral, because it’s good to experiment with IPv6 now to avoid a rushed implementation later.

For more information on IPv6 Day, please see this FAQ page.

taken from: http://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20110124