[afripv6-discuss] What have you done for IPv6 lately, since the 1st of January, 2013?

[Guy Antony Halse]

On Wed 2013-02-20 (17:04), Mukom Akong T. wrote:
> Nevertheless, turning on Web is a big win. Just curious did you or
> anyone with web issues investigate with using some kind of Proxy to
> circumvent the limitation of not wanting to enable native IPv6 on your
> web server/

As it happens, for various reasons, the actual web server isn't natively v6
capable.  (The web server software is; the jail it runs in isn't.)

When we tried to turn on v6 for World IPv6 Launch Day, it was in fact
tunnelled (6tunnel, http://toxygen.net/6tunnel/, to be specific).  However,
the concept is the same as proxying.

This had an interesting effect that I hadn't banked on -- it made external
IPv6 connections appear as internal v4 connections (the v4 address of the
proxy).  See below for the implications of this.

> Also I'd be curious to know --- what are the specific aspects of a web
> server that will break simply because one enabled IPv6?

 guy at www:/www/static/intranet$ cat .htaccess
 Order allow,deny
 Allow from 146.231.0.0/17
 Deny from all

Which is a daft idea anyway, but not my doing.  There are lots of examples
of this, and also a number of scripts that have dependencies on address space.

To fix this we need to do a complete audit of all content, find all the
dependencies on IPv4, and work out whether they can be fixed (or
alternatively, whether they don't serve a useful purpose).


In short, its much easier for me to turn on v6 on services that are
completely under my control than it is for services that have user-submitted
content.  I suspect that is generally true elsewhere, which is why I said
web isn't necessarily a good indicator.

- Guy
-- 
Manager: Systems, IT Division, Rhodes University, Grahamstown, South Africa
Email: G.Halse at ru.ac.za   Web: http://mombe.org/   IRC: rm-rf at irc.atrum.org
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