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Browsers Should Shame ISPs for not Providing IPv6 (programmerstrouble.blogspot.com)
4 points by jtwaleson on May 21, 2014 | hide | past | favorite | 6 comments



Shaming an ISP is one thing. Like pommi said, the end user might not be very interested in the fact that its connection to a web site is using IPv4 or IPv6. The end user just wants to see the content instead of an error.

The maintainer of the web site that the end user is visiting must make sure his website is reachable over either IPv4 and IPv6, so the content can be viewed by users who have an IPv4 only connection, a dual stack connection, or even an IPv6 only connection.

Doing so just requires to enable IPv4 and IPv6 on the entry point (loadbalancer / front facing web server) of the place where the web site is hosted.

What I'd like to get shamed, is the poor adoption of IPv6 in all major "cloud" systems. Where's the IPv6 address on the VM I can start at amazon[1], where's proper IPv6 support in OpenStack [2], CloudStack [3], CloudFoundry [4] etc. etc...

[1] http://blog.iphoting.com/blog/2012/06/02/ipv6-on-amazon-aws-... [2] https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Neutron/IPv6 [3] http://docs.cloudstack.apache.org/en/latest/networking/ipv6.... [4] cannot even find a sensible page to quote here when I google it

IPv6 is not only about the fact that you can put some address on an external facing loadbalancer. The applications I want to run on my IaaS, PaaS or WhateverAas are also clients who connect to the internet, just like a web browser.


There isn't really a way for the browser to know if it's your ISP that doesn't support IPv6 or the site itself. It would have to ask an external host what your IP address was, then look up that address in a database of ISPs, then check to see if the ISP supports IPv6.

Edit: there is an extension that tells you if the site loaded in IPv4 or v6, but it can't tell you why. Firefox https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ipvfox/ and Chrome https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ipvfoo/ecanpcehffn...


Good point, but I think that making a database with this information would certainly be doable for companies like Microsoft and Google.


Nice initiative, but don't bother end users with this, they are totally not interested. They won't even know what the are complaining about when they click that link in the popup. And when browsers start something like this, why not make more icons in the address bar, like not using proper SSL ciphers, not using DNSSEC or "this website includes 3rd party scripts" the webmaster should be ashamed about...


Maybe you're right, but a) I don't think there are any other options (Governments have great difficulty forcing policies on the Internet), so in a way this would be a last resort. b) DNSSEC etc would also be nice, but I think the ipv6 crisis is a lot more important at the moment. If we have to focus on one thing it would be ipv6.


i like the idea. but think of all the home network equipment that doesn't support/needs an update to support IPv6.




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