Speaking of Standards

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.

We weren’t the only ones with April Fool’s Day posts, of course, and the web was littered with them last week. The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) continued its very long tradition of participating (who can forget RFC 1149, IP over Avian Carriers?), although their 2009 contributions didn’t get out on the web until the evening of April 1, so many may have missed the pieces. They were:

• RFC 5513 – IANA Considerations for Three Letter Acronyms

• RFC 5514 – IPv6 over Social Networks

RFC 5513 suggests that because of the confusion with TLAs, IANA should create a registry for TLAs. Here is the abstract:

Three Letter Acronyms (TLAs) are commonly used to identify components of networks or protocols as designed or specified within the IETF. A common concern is that one acronym may have multiple expansions. While this may not have been an issue in the past, network convergence means that protocols that did not previously operate together are now found in close proximity. This results in contention for acronyms, and confusion in interpretation. Such confusion has the potential to degrade the performance of the Internet as misunderstandings lead to misconfiguration or other operating errors.

Given the growing use of TLAs and the relatively small number available, this document specifies a Badly Construed Proposal (BCP) for the management of a registry of TLAs within the IETF, and the procedures for the allocation of new TLAs from the registry.

Linguists and others who are find language amusing or interesting may enjoy the full document.

RFC 5514 also confronts a daunting issue, namely the low adoption of IPv6, and suggests that the solution is to route IPv6 across social networks and in particular Facebook:

There is a lack of IPv6 utilization in early 2009; this is partly linked to the fact that the number of IPv6 nodes is rather low. This document proposes to vastly increase the number of IPv6 hosts by transforming all Social Networking platforms into IPv6 networks. This will immediately add millions of IPv6 hosts to the existing IPv6 Internet. This document includes sections on addressing and transport of IPv6 over a Social Network. A working prototype has been developed.

The amusing part is that some folks actually did write a prototype Facebook application.

Fun, fun, fun…

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Technorati Tags: IETF, april1, aprilfools, facebook, ipv6