CircleID

As announced on RIPE Labs we monitored the behaviour of a number of networks that participated in the World IPv6 Launch on 6 June 2012. For that, we looked at the full list of participating organisations as shown on the ISOC website and chose 50 websites from that list. We looked at 'interesting' sites and at geographic distribution. We also tried to find a good mix of networks that had IPv6 switched on already and those that didn't have IPv6 deployed at the time they registered on the ISOC web site.

For the 50 selected websites we checked whether they had AAAA records registered in the DNS for their main website. This is a necessary step to enable end-users to visit the website over IPv6.

The image below shows our AAAA measurements from 1 – 11 June. The green lines indicate that for most websites AAAA records were included sometime on 6 June, others a little later. The websites that show blue bars in the graph decided not to switch on IPv6 yet. These websites are still only reachable over IPv4.

AAAA record announced in the DNS for 50 World IPv6 Launch participants during June 2012.
(Click to Enlarge)

The idea behind this year's initiative was that websites would keep IPv6 on after 6 June - contrary to last year's World IPv6 Day. It is good to see that all websites that had IPv6 switched on during World IPv6 Launch this year have kept it on. That means, they left their AAAA in the DNS and didn't remove it like many did last year just after World IPv6 Day. This is good news and can be seen as a big success of this year's initiative. For more information, please refer to the background article on RIPE Labs.

By Mirjam Kuehne

Related topics: DNS, IP Addressing, IPv6