Minute Electron wrote:

On 6/7/08, Marco Schuster marco@harddisk.is-a-geek.org wrote:

...

ps: when will wikipedia have ipv6 reachability??

I believe the main issue is that some of the software that runs the sites, for example squid, does not yet support ipv6. This would be necessary before ipv6 support can be fully given.

As far as I know there is a ipv6 gateway to access Wikimedia; but native ipv6 would be preferable.

This is actually easily circumventable by putting another proxy in front, which can convert IPv6 to IPv4, after which the normal IPv4 infrastructure already in place can be used.

The real problem is that we cannot put an AAAA record on the main hostnames like en.wikipedia.org, as it would break site reachability for too many people who have broken v6 connectivity. Therefore we would have to use an alternative like en.ipv6.wikipedia.org, but this has other problems like doubling the necessary cache as links inside rendered html pages etc. will also have to be different.

Another problem might be the maturity of IPv6 support in MediaWiki, and the effect on the community when they see strange IPv6 addresses and such.

Also our IPv6 connectivity at our main site in Tampa is not ready for production use yet... but hopefully that will improve soon.

That said, we are working on it (mostly as one of my spare time projects ;) so you should see more and more services coming online with IPv6 enabled in the near future, as well as elements of the main wiki sites becoming reachable over v6 in some way or another, in careful baby steps.

A lot of our miscellaneous services such as lists.wikimedia.org, svn.wikimedia.org, download.wikimedia.org, bugzilla, toolserver, etc. are already reachable over IPv6. We may soon start doing some measurements using javascript on popular wiki pages to see how much would break if we'd try to load an image bug from a hostname with both IPv4 and IPv6. And I'm also thinking of starting an opt-in test with AAAA records on our main hostnames for some ISPs that are willing to work with us to quickly resolve issues when things break.

So in short, we are actually thinking about doing something on this front. But please also understand that we still have very limited resources to do this; we have many more important things to work on and making sure the site is and stays alive still takes more time than we really have. And we should always keep in mind that breaking people's complete (IPv4) site reachability and/or deliver a worse service opver IPv6 would be a very, very bad way to promote use of IPv6.