IPv6 deployment

IPv6 is a new version of the Internet protocol with a greatly enlarged address space. Deployment of IPv6 on the public Internet is ongoing.

The success of IPv6 is important for the preservation of the any-to-any internet, a technical characteristic of the Internet which is important to Wikimedia's mission and other decentralized or peer-to-peer information services.

For Wikimedia IPv6 deployment is relatively straight-forward as the majority of the software infrastructure already has solid IPv6 support, but a fairly large number of small technical details must be resolved before full IPv6 support can be realized.

Current IPv6 Deployment status

IPv6 network status at Wikimedia

• The Kennisnet cluster has rich IPv6 connectivity with over 80 IPv6 peers.
• The Tampa cluster has basic IPv6 connectivity via a tunnel at an upstream provider. As of June 2008 there are near term plans to improve this.
• There is no IPv6 connectivity for Wikimedia at the Yahoo cluster currently.

IPv6 production testing at Wikimedia

• Ongoing testing for clients with broken IPv6 support using client side scripting on English Wikipedia.

Fully IPv6 enabled services at Wikimedia

• lists.wikimedia.org (as well as the Wikimedia MXes)
• download.wikimedia.org
• svn.wikimedia.org
• bugzilla.wikimedia.org
• toolserver.org

Known outstanding technical issues

• Interaction of broken dual-stack clients and AAAA records.
• Squid IPv6 client support.
• Mediawiki blocking support.