[Wikimedia-l] Update on IPv6

[Erik Moeller]

Hi Risker et al,

a few important points:
* IPv6 adoption is still below 1% globally [1].
* It's likely that we'll encounter network-level issues well before we
hit application-level issues during limited production testing.
* In the event that we manage to resolve all issues, it's likely that
we'll only see very limited use/abuse of IPv6 addresses and that we'll
have plenty of time to adjust procedures and documentation.
* We can abort this fairly easily, or as Tim suggests, employ global
blocks of IPv6 addresses to manage abuse.

As noted, the plan is to engage in limited production testing this
weekend, with possible full deployment by IPv6 Day (Wednesday). I
should also note that the degree to which all the complex network and
software interactions of a deployment like this can be tested without
actually changing or affecting production operations is limited. We're
going to be debugging issues in real-time.

I appreciate that this is very short notice for lots of people and
apologize for that; thanks to Tilman for helping with the global
notice dissemination. There's pretty good likelihood that aside from
maybe some brief service interruptions, the user impact is going to be
close to nil, either due to an abort early on, or due to very limited
IPv6 usage.

Moving towards full IPv6 support is part of our responsibility as a
good Internet citizen, and this has been in the works for a long time.
It's never been an option not to do this as IPv4 addresses are being
exhausted.

Regarding privacy, both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses can be dangerously
revealing in terms of personal identity (e.g. some ISPs even tie
street address information to your IPv4 address). It's always been
fundamentally problematic that MediaWiki reveals this information
nakedly, and it's what enabled past large-scale investigations like
WikiScanner, for good and for ill. In the mid to long term, I believe
we need to investigate moving away from full disclosure of IP
addresses when editing without logging in, but this is independent of
IPv4/IPv6.

All best,
Erik

[1] https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics/

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

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