World IPv6 Day – Do Something – Anything!

June 8th, 2011 is World IPv6 Day and on that day, Google, Facebook, Yahoo!, Akamai and Limelight Networkswill be amongst some of the major organisations that will offer their content over IPv6 for a 24-hour “test flight”.

I’m trying to push June 8th as a ‘flag day’ for smaller companies to get something – anything – done with IPv6. Enabling AAAA on their websites (and leaving it on) would be super. Some other suggestions I have:

  1. Register on IPv6Ready.ie and add the badge to your site. Even if it’s Pending IPv6, the whole point of the project is to nudge the level of awareness up a notch and we need badges on sites for that.
  2. If you haven’t even used IPv6 before, get a SixXS tunnel and be sure to choose either HEAnet, Airwire or Digiweb as your tunnel broker. All are members of INEX with good IPv6 connectivity so you’ll see low latency with good connectivity on these.
  3. If you want to get IPv6 on your LAN and your ISP won’t provide it, then (a) bug them some more; and (b) as a intermediate measure, also get a subnet from SixXS for your LAN.
  4. Dual stack your mail server and add a AAAA record to your MX hosts. This is a really simple and painless first step as SMTP is such a resilient protocol, if the mail cannot be delivered over v6, it’ll fall back to v4. Postfix, Sendmail and others have been IPv6 capable for years.
  5. Dual stack your DNS server. Like Postfix / Sendmail, Bind has been IPv6 capable for years. Get it listening on v6 and then add AAAA records to at least one of them.
  6. Hurricane Electric have a very useful IPv6 Certification program (see it at http://ipv6.he.net/certification/) which certifies an individuals ability. It’s a free process and what’s great about it is that, even if not interested in the cert, working through the process gets you configuring IPv6 on your web server, email server and DNS.
  7. Always look for IPv6 when choosing an ISP, a hosting provider, equipment vendors, and SaaS. Even if not a deciding factor, ask for IPv6 support to keep nudging it up the list of priorities for service providers.
  8. Register and display a badge from www.ipv6ready.ie. Did I say that already?