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Re: NANOG 40 agenda posted

  • From: Nathan Ward
  • Date: Tue May 29 20:25:05 2007

On 30/05/2007, at 5:40 AM, Donald Stahl wrote:


How do you get mail.ipv6.yahoo.com to actually get *used*, when your average
user doesn't know where they set 'mail.yahoo.com' in their PC's configuration,
and either don't understand why sometimes's it's foo.com and sometimes it's
www.foo.com, or don't even bother, they just type 'foo' into the address bar
and let the browser add www. and .com, or they go to google and enter 'foo'
and hit "I feel lucky"?
I don't want these sorts of people testing my systems with IPv6- I want a technically savvy user who can offer me helpful feedback- at least initially. Eventually- once I am sure the network is stable- the service is stable, etc.- then you can add A and AAAA records for the primary service.

I've got an idea that just fell out of my brain for web content providers to get a handle on their 'ipv6-ability' - how many eyeballs they would lose by adding www AAAA records.
Use Javascript, or flash, or some other fancy thing to do a GET for two files on two different servers as the page loads:
a) http://ip6test.<domain>/file
b) http://ip4test.<domain>/file

And then compare the hit-rate for the two. Perhaps also analyse things like X-Forwarded-For headers to see if HTTP proxies are being used, and so on.
Maybe an IPv4 POST happens with some kind of load time results, etc.

One could use a system like this to pop up a message to those who would become unreachable, and say "Follow these steps so that you can reach us next week when we turn on www AAAA records". Or perhaps, "Contact your ISP helpdesk for assistance".


My initial thought was "That means an additional GET per page, that means lots of server+network load!", but Yahoo! (for example) appears to do 35 requests for me to get their homepage, and the responses are all larger than 0b.


I'll have a hunt around and see if I can get Javascript/ XMLHTTPRequest to give me return codes as to why an HTTP GET failed (ie. unreachable, "host not found", etc.). If not, maybe Flash can do it.


Of course, has this sort of thing been done before?

--
Nathan Ward