ipv6experiment.com progress update / mailing list

[Kevin Day <toasty@dragondata.com>]

Hey, v6 ops community!

Last year we announced our intentions of running a large scale "see  
what happens when the masses try using ipv6" experiment, described in  
detail at http://www.ipv6experiment.com. While it took a lot longer  
than any of us had hoped, we now have just about everything in place  
to get started.

For the most part, the extent of impact that any of you should see is  
that some of your users who had never used IPv6 before will play with  
it, possibly resulting in increased v6 traffic... be it native, 6to4,  
Teredo or through a tunnel broker such as SixXS. Unless you are  
providing v6 to users in some way (native v6 connections, or running  
your own Tunnel/Teredo/6to4 relay) any increased traffic will be  
purely v4. If you do run v6 of any kind to your users, we're trying to  
make the impact as small as possible while still providing enough  
motivation for people to actually try this.

However, there have been concerns raised by a few networks that we're  
going to break their v6 backbone by encouraging the masses to download  
large files over v6 over a short timeframe. I personally don't think  
that's going to be that much of a problem... If the small number of  
people who actually do play with this cause any kind of congestion,  
TCP should take care of it within reason. But, I'd like to open a  
dialog with those who are worried or interested in the project before  
we begin. I've had a private discussion with the operator of one large- 
ish network who wants to null-route our address space during the  
experiment - I've convinced him to talk about it in public on a  
mailing list we've set up for the discussion of the project before  
doing so.

Since most of this isn't really on topic for this mailing list, I'd  
like to suggest that anyone who wants to talk about this to hop on our  
new mailing list for the experiment... either to discuss the  
methodology/data collection aspect of the experiment itself, it's  
impact on your network or anything else. http://mail.your.org/mailman/listinfo/v6test 
 to sign up. Not to try to take away any discussion from this list,  
but I think the majority of you guys here aren't that concerned with  
the details here, so I'm trying to keep the chatter down.

I'll post one more time here before the experiment starts with the  
dates/IPs/details just so everyone's properly warned. :)

-- Kevin