Speaking of Standards

With World IPv6 Day coming up on June 8th, 2011, it’s only appropriate that the site for the big day have its own URL. Previously it was hanging off of the Internet Society’s isoc.org but now it is at the brilliantly simple:

http://www.worldipv6day.org/

ISOC has also set up a specific Twitter account at @World_IPv6_Day and seems to be encouraging the use of the hashtag “#v6day”.

As an advocate for IPv6, it’s great to see all the attention and buzz happening around “World IPv6 Day”… and kudos to the folks at ISOC and their partners for putting together both the day itself and also this website with supporting materials.
 

I just noticed this morning that Randy over at the VoIP Users Conference (VUC) has a second hour of today’s show focused on IPv6 and SIP as it relates to offerings from Junction Networks. As the show page says:

IPv6 has serious benefits for SIP, so Junction Networks has made it a priority to begin making their network and systems IPv6 ready. Currently, they are directly connected to the IPv6 Internet via multiple providers and have established network infrastructure and redundancy.

The call is today, Friday, May 27, 2011, at 1:00pm US Eastern.

You can join the live call via SIP, Skype or the regular old PSTN. There is also an IRC backchannel that gets heavy usage during the call. It will be recorded so you can always listen later.

For those interested in other VoIP topics, hour #1 of today’s VUC will be about new video-capable SIP phones and other devices from Grandstream Networks.

With World IPv6 Day fast approaching on June 8th, I have found it interesting that there are two separate IPv6 test sites that I’ve seen people recommending: ipv6-test.com and test-ipv6.com.

ipv6-test.com

IPv6-test.com was the first of the two sites I personally came across and wrote about here back in January. The site has evolved quite a bit since that time and offers additional services beyond the simple IPv6 test:

• a speed test that will test your speed on both IPv4 and IPv6 (predictably for me IPv6 is slower as I use a tunnel over IPv4)
• a ping test that will test the ping latency of both your IPv4 and IPv6 connections
• a website test to validate that a website can be seen over IPv6
• an IPv6 test widget that you can add to your website or blog
• statistics about IPv6 usage based on people using the site and now some forums for IPv6 discussion

All in all some interesting additions to the site:

It’s not clear exactly who is behind the site other than the domain being registered to a company in France, but the site is offering a great service for people wanting to test out their IPv6 connectivity.

P.S. They are looking for more people to host the software for their speed tests. Currently they have only their one server in France.

test-ipv6.com

Test-ipv6.com I learned about through the Internet Society’s World IPv6 Day page where they prominently list the site as a way to test our IPv6 connectivity. Like IPv6-test.com, the tests start right away and you wind up with a report telling you how you did:

The site does a nice job with then showing you the tests that were run … and diving into deeper technical detail about what was done in each of the tests:

You can then tweet out your the page or Like the site’s Facebook page.

The site indicates it is the personal website of Jason Fesler who on his Twitter account indicates that by day he is a “IPv6 guy at Yahoo!” He also posts a mission statement and a FAQ for the site. There is a long list of mirrors and the code being used is available from Google Project Hosting as “falling sky”. (He also seems to have created the simpler http://omgipv6day.com/ site.)

Regardless of which site you use – or if, like me, you use them both – they are great tools to help understand what level of IPv6 connectivity you have available to you.

Thanks to both groups for hosting the sites and having the services available.

With World IPv6 Day fast approaching on June 8, 2011, an Internet-Draft you may find helpful is the aptly titled:

World IPv6 Day Call To Arms

As the abstract states:

The Internet Society (ISOC) has declared that June 8th 2011 will be World IPv6 Day, on which some major organisations are going to make their content available over IPv6. With the likes of Google and Facebook providing IPv6 access to their production services and domains, it is very likely we will see more IPv6 traffic flowing across the Internet than has ever been seen before. With this in mind, it seems timely to issue a call to arms for systems and network administrators to review their organisation’s IPv6 capabilities in order to mitigate common causes of IPv6 connectivity problems in advance of the day. The increased traffic on World IPv6 Day should also create an excellent opportunity to observe the behaviour and performance of IPv6; it is thus very desirable to have appropriate measurement tools in place in advance. We discuss some appropriate tools from the network and application perspective.

A paragraph in the Introduction outlines the goal of the document:

The purpose of this document is two-fold. One is to discuss common IPv6 connectivity issues that are likely to arise on June 8th, with a focus on dual-stack networking (which is likely to be how the vast majority of sites take part). Most of the issues discussed in this text are those that would affect an end site or enterprise network running IPv6, but may be applicable elsewhere. Highlighting the issues should help raise awareness of those problems and possible mitigations. The other purpose is to encourage organisations to think about how they might get useful instrumentation in place to observe what happens in and to/from their networks on the day, both from the network and application perspective. Such measurement tools are likely to be useful in the longer term, so once deployed they could be left in place beyond June 8th.

The document then succinctly lays out connectivity issues that users may face on World IPv6 Day and strategies for dealing with those issues.

All in all a useful document and one that is worth checking out if you are planning to participate in the World IPv6 Day activity.

As I’ve been talking and writing about IPv6 lately, I recently had someone ask me about the “letters” in an IPv6 address. I realized that if you don’t come out of the realm of computer programming (or mathematics) the whole concept of “hexadecimal” numbering would be quite foreign.

So here’s the deal… the numbering system we normally use is the “decimal” system and is also called “base 10″. There are 10 possible digits that we use when we are counting: 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9. We combine all those digits together to make the numbers that we use for everything we do.

Presumably we all got started with counting in base 10 because that’s how many fingers we (normally) have.

Computers, on the other hand, don’t have 10 fingers… and they ultimately do their counting in “binary” notation, a.k.a. “base 2″. In binary, there are exactly two digits: 0 and 1.

As people started programming computers, representing numbers in binary was cumbersome… and decimal numbers didn’t really line up with the way computer chips actually work down on a bit level. So people started using other numbering systems based on powers of 2. Some systems used “octal” notation, which is “base 8″ and uses the digits 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7.

And other systems use “hexadecimal” notation, a.k.a. “base 16″. The challenge with going above 10, of course, is that we don’t have digit symbols to represent anything above 9. So people started using the letters A, B, C, D, E and F (in either upper or lowercase) to fill out the range of possible values. So 10 in decimal is “a” in hexadecimal, 11 is “b”, etc.

So that’s what is going on… IPv6 addresses use hexadecimal values instead of decimal values. Here’s a quick table to show you what the values are in the various systems:

You can see the pattern… and that’s how hexadecimal notation works!

P.S. If you’re really interested in learning even more about hexadecimal notation, there’s a rather detailed entry at Wikipedia that will give you more than you probably really care to know.

Given that IPv6 uses hexadecimal notation and adds the letters “a-f” to the address space, you have to expect people will play around with possible spelling combinations. For instance, a perfectly valid IPv6 address would be:

2001:db8:1212::bad:f00d

or “bad:d00d” or “d06:f00d“, etc. You get the idea.

Well, courtesy of twitter user Henrik Aslund, I learned that someone savvy at Facebook has already engaged in some fun. If you have access to a command prompt with the dig command, simply type this:

dig aaaa www.v6.facebook.com

The answer you should see coming back is:

2620:0:1cfe:face:b00c::3

Well done, Facebook… well done!

What other fun IPv6 addresses have you seen floating around out on the Internet? Anyone else with valid AAAA records that are amusing?

P.S. And yes, Henrik Aslund mentions two others in his Twitter stream from Google and Cisco, but I’ve not been able to get those IPv6 addresses back via dig.

In about 20 minutes at 1pm US Eastern (5pm UTC), the “Web Real-Time Communications Working Group” of the W3C will be holding its first conference call. As announced yesterday, the call will primarily be about introductions, reviewing the working group charter and determining the next steps. If you are able to join today, the info is:

Phone: +1 617 761 6200 or SIP: zakim@voip.w3.org
Conference Code: 26631
IRC channel: #webrtc

If you aren’t able to attend but are interested in the effort, the best bet is to join the “public-webrtc” mailing list.

This is the W3C side of the “RTCWEB” initiative I’ve been writing about here, which is essentially looking at how we standardize real-time communications from within web browsers and other similar apps. Definitely an effort worth paying attention to!

Today AOL announced that they would be joining in the World IPv6 Day event on June 8, 2011. This is great to see given the large amount of content published by AOL on a daily basis.

Now, not all AOL properties will be participating in World IPv6 Day. The announcement makes it clear that only these sites will be involved:

• AOL Homepage – http://www.aol.com
• AOL Search – http://search.aol.com
• Mapquest – http://www.mapquest.com
• Engadget – http://www.engadget.com

The Huffington Post and other AOL sites will not be part of the experiment. Still, it’s great to see a large content provider like this participate.

The key point of World IPv6 Day is that the main websites of sites like these will be available over both IPv6 and IPv4. If you are on IPv6, you won’t have to go to a separate site (like “www.ipv6.example.com”) but will instead just go to the main website of the company or organization. Hopefully folks out there will learn some good lessons with IPv6 interop and we’ll be able to move the needle on IPv6 adoption.

Would you like a spiffy “World IPv6 Day” design to use on a button, badge, sticker or even a T-Shirt? Someone at the Internet Society (ISOC) got pretty creative for the upcoming World IPv6 Day on June 8th and created a whole group of designs that you can download and use on your web site or turn into offline products like buttons, stickers and more. You can find the available designs at:

http://isoc.org/wp/worldipv6day/downloads/

For those who want to embed a graphic instead of download a graphic and install it on a server, ISOC has several available varieties such as the image I’m using on the right. They are all at (somewhat predictably):

http://isoc.org/wp/worldipv6day/embeds/

Very cool to see, and I’m looking forward to seeing what people do with all these designs!

The Real-Time Communications in WEB-browser (RTCWEB) Working Group within the IETF will be holding an “interim meeting” on:

Date: Wednesday, June 8, 2011
Time: 16:30-20:30 CEST
10:30-14:30 US Eastern time
7.30-11.30 US Pacific time

To discuss plans related to advancing the work outlined in the group’s charter. I’ve mentioned the “RTCWEB” initiative in the past and definitely believe it is both valuable and necessary. Although that same day is World IPv6 Day and I expect to be engaged in IPv6 promotion activities, I do plan to dial in to this interim meeting to listen and participate.

If you’d like to join in, the best bet is to subscribe to the IETF rtcweb mailing list as the agenda and attendance information will be circulated on that list.