[Wikimedia-l] [Wikitech-l] Update on IPv6

[Erik Moeller]

On Wed, Jun 6, 2012 at 6:59 AM, Freek Dijkstra <software at macfreek.nl> wrote:
> I want to express my gratitude for all engineers who made this happen.
> Kudos and compliments to all of you.

Credit goes to Mark Bergsma, Faidon Liambotis, Ryan Lane, Asher
Feldman, Aaron Schulz, Chris Steipp, and many others for helping make
this happen. Many members of the team worked practically nonstop to
ensure that we can launch on IPv6 Day. Here's a full update from Mark:

[begin quote]
Today, between 10:00 and 11:00 UTC, we've gradually enabled IPv6 for
all wikis. We started with upload, followed by bits, then the main
wikis, and concluded with the mobile cluster.

So far it seems to be working fine. We're seeing some edits being made
over IPv6, and IPv6 traffic is in the low tens of Mbps range. Browsing
the sites over IPv6 seems to just work like it does with v4. I haven't
heard of a single complaint yet. It was very uneventful. :-)

Nonetheless, there will be a very small (fractional) percentage of
clients who no longer can access our sites. Part of the idea of today
- IPv6 Launch Day - is to collectively force these clients and
relevant network issues to get fixed. Faidon has also improved my old
"selective-answer.py" DNS backend, previously used for IPv6 DNS
whitelisting, to allow it to be used as a blacklist. If we find
networks that are unable or unwilling to resolve any IPv6 issues, then
we can selectively disable IPv6 for their IP address prefixes. This is
not in use yet, but can be deployed quickly.
[end quote]

There will surely be new MediaWiki or tool/bot level issues as well,
but hopefully they'll be manageable without a rollback. The best way
to report most issues is through https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/ and
by adding the "ipv6" keyword.


-- 
Erik Möller
VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation

Support Free Knowledge: https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate