IPv6 is Here!

jakem

8

World IPv6 Launch BadgeI am very excited to announce that we have rolled out a number of our top-tier websites over IPv6!

Thanks to some extraordinary effort by our Network Operations team, our PHX1 datacenter now has full IPv6 connectivity, and we’re taking advantage of it by adding v6 addresses for as many things in it as possible. Next up for them is SCL3, so we can do the same thing with sites hosted there.

You may recall we participated in last year’s World IPv6 Day. Some of our properties gained AAAA records back then, but over the year since they have all been removed for one reason or another… mostly because we only had IPv6 connectivity in one datacenter at the time, and it’s the one we’ve been vacating for the last few months.

Last year’s IPv6 Day was a trial run- the stated goal of the event was to have as many sites as possible turn on IPv6 connectivity for the day, with the understanding that they would likely turn it back off afterwards to fix whatever may have gone wrong. This year the event is returning, and plan is to turn it on and leave it on. Like last year, Mozilla is planning to participate as much as we can. This time, we’ll have a much larger collection of IPv6-enabled sites.

To that point, I am proud to announce that the following sites currently have full IPv6 connectivity, as of this week:

 

Several other (smaller) sites have working IPv6 connectivity as well.

Additionally, the following sites have partial IPv6 connectivity, meaning that IPv6 works in some regions but not others:

 

The chief culprit holding these back is that they’re hosted (or cached) out of datacenters where we do not have production-ready IPv6 connectivity just yet. These sites will improve further before World IPv6 Day, and more will be added.

While we’re on the subject, you might be interested in an IPv6-related Firefox extension, of which there are many. SixOrNot is a popular one. Even if you don’t have IPv6 connectivity yourself, it will show you if the site is available over v6 or not, as well as the IPv6 status of any resources on the page (Webtrends, GA, Gravatar, etc).

Be on the lookout for future announcements as World IPv6 Day approaches!

8 responses

  1. Martin ‘MMx’ Creutziger wrote on :

    Is there any plan to also provide IPv6 connectivity for irc.mozilla.org?
    I am using IRC over IPv6 already for years (freenode) and it would be great to finally have this for MozNet, too :-)

    1. Martin ‘MMx’ Creutziger wrote on :

      an addition, as I don’t “just want to rant”:
      It is great to see that IPv6 is finally taking up speed also at Mozilla. Keep up the good work!

      Greetings from Germany

    2. jakem wrote on :

      No guarantees, but we’re hoping to have IPv6 for at least one of the irc.mozilla.org servers before World IPv6 Day. There seems to be quite a bit of interest in it. :)

  2. Thomas wrote on :

    But what about irc.mozilla.org? :)

  3. invisible15 wrote on :

    I’m from Spain and I have an ipv6 tunnel with gogonet.
    I can visit support.mozilla.org, using ipv6 but I can’t visit http://www.mozilla.org so it means that in Spain the main page isn’t avaliable in ipv6, right?

    1. jakem wrote on :

      I am somewhat surprised that support.mozilla.org works over IPv6 from Spain, but not surprised that http://www.mozilla.org doesn’t. Our European datacenter (in Amsterdam) does not currently have IPv6 support. You should be getting directed there for both names, but I guess something is mixed up in the GeoIP records used by support.mozilla.org and you’re getting sent to Phoenix instead, where IPv6 works.

  4. Noah wrote on :

    w00t! I was disappointed to notice that the sites lost their v6 addresses at some point over the past year, and I’m excited to see that they’re back and even better than before! Indeed, IPvFox reveals that even blog.cdn.mozilla.net is resolving to a v6 address. Neat!

    1. jakem wrote on :

      Hello old friend!

      I’m hoping to make IPv6 a more standard part of site rollouts in the future. It’s fairly easy to do in most cases… just an extra IP listed in the relevant Zeus Traffic IP Group, and a bit of DNS work.

      Sadly the blog.cdn.mozilla.net IPv6 support is likely to disappear soon… it’s presently not a real CDN, just the groundwork for supporting one, and points right back to us. Once it points to a real CDN, we’ll be at the mercy of the vendor. Akamai has at least some support, so maybe we’ll be able to use that. :)