IPv6 Hall of Shame

Winfried Tilanus — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 21:54:00 GMT

One of the obstacles for the migration to IPv6 is the big number of clients that think they have IPv6 connectivity, where they don't have any in reality. To such clients a part of the internet seems to be unbelievable slow, they have to wait for their browser (or other program) to time-out in IPv6 before they get anything in. About a quarter percent of all clients has IPv6 connectivity, about a tenth percent of all clients thinks it has IPv6 connectivity, where they don't have any in reality. (see this research)

So many sites don't want to loose that tenth percent of the users and wait with implementing IPv6 until the clients are fixed. But something worse might be the case: sites that advertise they are reachable by IPv6, but aren't. These sites have the same extreme slowing effect, but on the quarter of a percent users that do have correct IPv6 connectivity. And that is exactly the minority I am in. Each time I stumble upon such a site, I ask the owner politely to fix their IPv6 connectivity. Almost always the owner makes sure the problem is fixed in a reasonable time.

Today I unfortunately came across an owner who could not get his IPv6 connectivity fixed. So I created something I call the IPv6 hall of shame. It is a corner in my firewall were I reject sites with a chronic broken IPv6 connectivity: A line telling to reject connections to that IPv6 address. That causes my firewall to tell my programs the site is unreachable by IPv6, so the programs don't have to wait and wait before they come to that conclusion themselves. That fixes it for me, but of course the site stays broken...

Sorry Adam from http://www.emergentchaos.com/, I know it is not your fault, but you are the first to enter my IPv6 Hall of Shame.

Update march 16, 2010: Today I could remove emergentchaos from my hall of shame: they have a new hostingprovider and could fix their site