World IPv6 Day Results

Yesterday was World IPv6 Day and openSUSE participated in it. We hope the experiment was as successful for the other participants as it was for us!

Here is a short status update from the openSUSE infrastructure. openSUSE has currently two major server locations and we tested IPv6 at both separately.  Note that there are more openSUSE infrastructure locations, including the server which runs the popular planet.opensuse.org (which supports IPv6 as well now)!

Nürnberg

In Nürnberg, Germany, the following main services were enabled:

• download.opensuse.org

• build.opensuse.org

• lists.opensuse.org

• {many_web_sites}.opensuse.org

Just two services did not make it in time: the torrent tracker and the email servers. Our current tracker software does not support IPv6 - and the dedicated new tracker needs more love from our packager. The mail servers are provided by our ISP so we left them as they were.

All our other services are RUNNNING on IPv4+IPv6 and WILL STAY on IPv4+IPv6 even if the IPv6 day is over now. We have seen an increase from ~1% IPv6 bandwidth usage to ~7% bandwidth usage today, which is impressive and encouraging!

Provo

In Provo, US, the following main services were enabled:

• {lang}.opensuse.org wikis

• forums.opensuse.org

• lizards and news.opensuse.org

Currently these services provide IPv6, but we are facing two kinds of problems, proving how useful the World IPv6 day was for us:

1. Native IPv6 users reported problems which are MTU related. Manually lowering the MTU on the client side fixed their problems, but this is something that we are working on closely together with our ISP.

2. Some sites are not accessible from some clients. But clients from the same subnet did not have the problems. More mysterious: the problematic clients can reach other servers without problems. This is currently the problem which needs some deep investigation.

We are currently discussing whether we can solve these issues quickly or have to disable IPv6 again for our servers in Provo.

The following problems were solved during World IPv6 day:

• One package on our openSUSE distribution needed patches: the apache2-mod_geoip package used on download.opensuse.org

• we found two packages (vsftpd and torrent-seeder) which can’t handle IPv4 and IPv6 at the same time

In conclusion, the world IPv6 day participation showed openSUSE to be quite ready for IPv6 - and we will work on fixing the few problems we encountered.

I’d like to mention two people especially and thank them for their hard work, great help and enthusiasm: Christian Deckelmann (who provides us with the needed infrastructure, resources and knowledge) and Marcus Rückert (who handled all the configuration changes and patches that are needed on our servers).