How Do We Get To IPv6? - Page 2
Testing IPv6 on a large scale
One excuse however is the simple fact that IPv6 has not been tested on wide scale on big production websites. That will change on World IPv6 day in June.
"IPv6 day is about trying to address the issue of people that think they have IPv6 but actually don't," Levy said.
"If you're running IPv4 only on your network you won't notice IPv6 day," Levy added. "But what if you're at a hotel with a misconfigured gateway giving you a wrong v6 address? That's what v6 day is about, finding the problems."
IPv6 day is not about converting everyone though. Curran noted that initial focus of IPv6 conversion is public face servers, things like web and email services.
"We want everything that is external to the firewall to be v6 capable," Curran said. "There are people internally in enterprises that want the same tools for v6 than they have for v6, but you don't need to upgrade the LAN immediately, just the public facing serves first."
Security will also require some new efforts as techniques such as IP blacklisting won't work with IPv6.
"You can't keep a list of bad sites that you want to ban for spam with v6," Curran said. "So you need higher level solutions."
Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at InternetNews.com, the news service of Internet.com, the network for technology professionals.
