[Wikimedia-l] Update on IPv6

[Erik Moeller]

Hi folks,

Mark Bergsma just shared the following recap with me, for those who
are interested in the details of what happened at the hackathon and
next steps. tl;dr: If all goes well we'll be ready to launch full
production deployment on Wednesday, starting around 10AM UTC
(MediaWiki engineers will be working closely with the ops team
Wednesday to monitor bugs/issues).

Keep an eye on the server admin log and the puppet repo if you want to
know what's going on in full detail:

http://wikitech.wikimedia.org/view/Server_admin_log
https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/q/status:merged+project:operations/puppet,n,z

Erik

- - -

The last few days we've worked on getting the software ready (mainly
PyBal/LVS) as well as Puppet support for provisioning of IPv6
addresses to servers and configuration changes for IPv6 connectivity.
That's now 90% done. What remains is mostly to actually roll this out
for all services in all data centers, which we will be doing tomorrow.
Besides that, we have a few "would be nice to haves" left to do, such
as having our own 6to4 and miredo relays.

I just got the first LVS service running with IPv6, and am now
browsing upload.wikimedia.org over IPv6 (local /etc/hosts entry of
course, not in DNS yet). ipv6 support for LVS in Ubuntu Precise was
the last major uncertain factor on the infrastructure side; besides a
few quick tests in labs we had not really tested this yet in our
production setup. Fortunately, it appears to be working fine. Tomorrow
the remaining (inactive) LVS balancers will be reinstalled with
Precise and made IPv6-ready to support all other services, while the
currently active IPv4 balancers will keep their current setup for some
time to come - so we won't hit any surprises on IPv4 at least.

But, we haven't done any production tests with MediaWiki yet. We can
do some dark testing and actual edits tomorrow. Assuming we see no
surprises there, we can enable it for the all wikis and the general
public on Wednesday.

To conclude, we're on track on the infrastructure side. It is tight,
though. Assuming the MediaWiki side has no unwelcome surprises for us,
I expect to be able to make it.

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

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