News of 2007

SixXS wishes everybody a happy and fruitful 2007.

We proudly present a new version of AICCU which had a lot of changes, bugfixes, and updates. The license has been changed after discussions with various people. Special thanks to Theo de Raadt, Marco d'Itri and Philipp Kern for their wise words and reasoning for coming to this decision. Thanks also go out to the people who reported problems and supplied patches, feature requests and bugfixes.

Old versions of AICCU have broken support for AYIYA, these versions have now been officially deprecated and have been made unavailable.

Distributions carrying packaged versions of AICCU should come up to date soon with this new version. Contact your vendor and file bugreports with them if updates are not carried through. Fedora Core 5, 6, and development, Redhat Enterprise Extras (EPEL), RHEL4, RHEL5, Gentoo, NetBSD, FreeBSD will be updated in the next feed update, with many thanks to the maintainers of those packages for acting so swiftly!

There is no new Windows version, as no Windows related bugs where resolved. See the changelog for the details. Of course if there are problems, don't hesitate to report them.

This release fixes a number of recently reported problems which where found during wide deployment of the previous release. If the former version gave problems, then this version should resolve them. See the changelog for the details. Of course if there are problems, don't hesitate to report them.

We are proud to release to the general public a new point of presence hosted by the OCCAID project in Boston, Massachusetts. This usbos01.sixxs.net access point brings their grand total to five servers! To see a complete list, please visit their PoP page.

The Ghost Route Hunter (GRH) LookingGlass tool now optionally also shows which ASN's have and which ASN's don't have a certain prefix. This allows an ISP to quickly get an overview which ASN's do and which ASN's don't have a route to the requested prefix.

A special tool for GRH participants has been released which allows one to check up which prefixes a GRH peer is missing. The tool is part of the DFP Availability overview. This tool thus allows one to take a look from the ISP side, while the other missing tool takes a look from the prefix side, thus each complementing each other.

The two new GRH Missing tools forgot to mention one important thing: some prefixes are only seen at few ASN's. To remedy this and to make the output of GRH even more useful the DFP output now has 3 additional colors indicating how well the prefix is received at the various participants of GRH. Prefixes that are only received by a few participants (<30%) will be marked with a nearly red color, the next steps are 50% and 80%. At a level higher than 80% GRH assumes that the prefix is reachable perfectly fine. This thus means that GRH participants that don't receive those prefixes should really check their filters and update them appropriately.

The SixXS PoPs will cease support for the BETA AYIYA port number 8374 per the 1st of February 2007. The official AYIYA port number, 5072, which was allocated by IANA has been in use by all AICCU versions since 2005-08-14 which is when we also added this port to the PoPs. If you are still running a version of AICCU older than 2007-01-15 then we can only suggest that you upgrade as soon as possible. If you decide not to upgrade then your AYIYA connectivity will cease to work.

The site will, instead of its normal grey accents, be pink for the coming days to rejoice in the fact that a lady has been born into this world. Congratulations to the mom and dad!

Iljitsch van Beijnum, the author of both O'Reilly's BGP and "Running IPv6" has written an excellent article titled "Everything you need to know about IPv6"".Thus if you want to know (more) about IPv6, read up.

From now on we'll make this public known policy*: creative signup reasons that clearly show for what one is intending to use their IPv6 account+tunnel+subnet will immediately receive 15 bonus credits allowing one to immediately request a subnet for the first tunnel. As such, be creative, write a haiku, a limerick, or something funny. We also accept links to self-made, that is from your own hand, IPv6-related art that demonstrates your creativity. Existing users can also play along by sending their creativity to the well known contact address
Thus: Be Creative!

^{*: extra kudo credits have always been awarded for nice and good explanations}

Thanks to hard work from Philipp Kern, AICCU is now available in Debian in their main repository! It is being build for: alpha, amd64, arm, hppa, i386, ia64, m68k, mips, mipsel, powerpc, s390, and sparc platforms! Next to this the same version will also soon be available in the universe of Ubuntu.

We have been busy making the web interface more accessible and a bit less cluttered by tweaking it in the required places. Links for instance now have light orange underlines which make them less intrusive. The Forum and GRH's export ATOM feeds are now being published in ATOM 1.0 as per the RFC. We hope that these changes are beneficial to the usage of SixXS. In case you have comments on parts of this site, with of course suggestions on how things might improve to make it better to use, then don't hesitate to contact us.

In networking commonly packets will take the shortest path from A to B, this is as it says: Shortest Path Routing. Usually this calculation is done on the AS-PATH, the shortest AS-PATH that is the oldest for a particular destination gives the best possible route, and thus that is chosen. This is used in BGP and as such for the Internet. GRH monitors this Internet for the IPv6 BGP tables and sometimes one notices that a path is quite long as shown in the AS-PATH for that prefix. The length of such an AS-PATH doesn't tell much about the actual physical distance and it unfortunately still seems to happen that AS-PATH's are chosen that go a couple times around the world. To see how long these actually get, especially for this day we release a new extension to GRH: Longest Distance Routing.

Check this archived snapshot of the full routing table [4 MiB] which has the view from which we took the below results. The winners for the first annual Longest Distance Routing contest are:

2001:256::/32 24541 30071 2018 6149 11537 10764 23911 4538 23910 18011 at 53512 km
flowing through Australia, US, Africa, US, and China. Unfortunately, this one is not correct, TENET has a router in NY, and though their network is African these packets are not being shipped to Africa and back to the US again.

2001:200:a000::/35 26943 4436 3549 6939, 2516 7660, 22388 11537, 2500 at 45056 km
2001:200:a000::/35 19255, 26943, 4436 3549 6939, 2516 7660, 22388 11537, 2500 at 45056 km
going through The Netherlands, US, Japan, US, and Japan.
These two take the internal network of Your.org, so these two doesn't count either, although they are getting pretty long!

But these though are most likely pretty accurate:
2001:200:a000::/35 25441, 3257, 3549, 6939, 2516 7660, 22388 11537, 2500 at 40760 km
flowing through Ireland, Germany, Netherlands, US, Japan, US and Japan. 2001:200:a000::/35 1836, 3549, 6939, 2516 7660, 22388 11537, 2500 at 39500 km
flowing through Switzerland, Netherlands, US, Japan, US, and Japan.

We hope this shows that AS-PATH lengths are far from useful in some cases for determining the shortest path. We also hope that certain operators who do this long-distant transiting and full route-swap, consider not doing this for the sake of the IPv6 Internet. Thank you for your attention, and till next years edition of Longest Distance Routing!

Note: This feature is from now on available throughout GRH: Happy hunting!
Location data is based on the capital of the country in which the ASN resides. The location information is taken from the CIA Factbook.

As requested by the maintainers of the various AICCU packages, we have created a aiccu-announce mailinglist which will be used for announcing new versions of the AICCU package.

Please sign up for the mailinglist so that we can keep you up to date when a new version comes out.

The mailinglist is 1-way only, and messages have to be hand-approved, moderate bit is set on all subscribed addresses, before the message is distributed. As such the list should be very low volume and really announce-only.

As it is Mailman, one can of course use aiccu-announce-join@sixxs.net to join and all the all the other handy tools that Mailman provides.

Update (2010-03-01): This feature has been removed since.

HEAnet have upgraded the iedub01.sixxs.net. She is now equiped with full native Gigabit connectivity on both IPv4 and IPv6 which should thus allow users to use that bandwidth fully. As the new machine was pre-setup and then the IP addresses where simply switched over, the outage was left to a mere couple of seconds and thus should have mostly gone unnoticed. We have verified that everything is running fine and have decommisioned the old machine which has been running very stable and providing a great service over the last couple of years.

We have made another step forward in refreshing the website engine and therefore improving usability. All menu's should now be proper lists instead of tables, and as such more semantically correct. This especially improves rendering on mobile devices and smaller browsers The best visible change of these small changes can be found in the User Home and in the Forum. Most work was in the engine that drives the website though and these changes are not directly visible to the user, but they do make maintenance for SixXS much easier. We are also striving to full w3c XHTML1.1 Strict conformance. If you have questions/comments/problem reports, don't hesitate to contact SixXS.

It was brought to our attention that Wikipedia was not being properly gatewayed through our IPv6Gate. We have looked into this matter and have resolved this, thus making Wikipedia fully accessible from IPv6. Problems that occurred with cookies have also been resolved. Example Wikipedia direct access URL's:

• Wikipedia - English
• Wikipedia - Dutch
• Wikipedia - German
• Wikipedia - Chinese
• Wikipedia - Japanese

In case one encounters a problem with any of our services, of course don't hesitate to contact us about them.

Recently the 3000th active and in-use subnet has been allocated and the number has been solid for over a week now, thus we are allowed to claim that we have 3000 active and in-use /48's being provided by the PoPs. The statistics also show that we have over 7000 active and in-use tunnels on the 21 PoPs Of course, we have to thank the various ISPs who are providing the connectivity for these PoPs: Thanks!

Even though the probability of a collision of an IPv6 ULA (Unique Local Address / RFC4193) with 10.000 connections is still 4.54*10^-05, there have recently been concerns that some organizations, who got bitten by RFC1918 before, would not accept such a chance, and thus still would require such a prefix to be 100% unique. To help here, we are introducing a method of registering ULA prefixes. From now on, SixXS, maintain a voluntary registry of ULA prefixes. The new GRH tool allows one to generate an IPv6 ULA prefix from a MAC address and then register it in the list. Although this only guarantees uniqueness for organizations who register their prefixes, when this registry is well used it should avoid any other problem.

The tool can be found in GRH as IPv6 ULA (Unique Local Address) RFC4193 registration.

We have released a list of Cool IPv6 Stuff which contains a number of things which are available to IPv6 enabled clients but not to IPv4 clients. If you know of any others, don't hesitate to contact us so that they can be added to the list.

A small extra bonus feature for the users of the various SixXS PoPs: a globally distributed IPv4 and IPv6 NTP service. These NTP server sets (global, .us and .eu) are available to SixXS users over both IPv4 and IPv6. These servers will soon be anycasted on the various SixXS PoPs, thus when using them they will be as local as possible for the user of these PoPs. We especially recommend using a NTP server when using either the AYIYA or heartbeat protocols.

SixXS is returning to London, with a public PoP provided by Goscomb Technologies. Goscomb Technologies is a mainly business to business service provider based in London, UK. Native IPv6 products offered include ADSL, Colocation, Dedicated Servers and IP Transit as well as their IPv4 counterparts. This PoP is available for all UK based users and also to users from countries which don't have a local PoP.

The Interdisciplinary Centre for Mathematical and Computational Modeling (ICM) in Warsaw, Poland have provided us with a new PoP in their city located at the University of Warsaw. This PoP is publicly available for all Polish users. The PoP is connected directly to the Polish PIONIER network. A change-to-the-plwaw01-pop offer for existing Polish users will be sent out allowing users to start making use of their locally available PoP.

Further details about the PoP can be found on the ICM PoP Page.

We would also like to already attend people to the SixXS logo, the reason of the change will be unrevealed soon, further hints are that can be found on the website already.

We are very proud to present a new PoP in the SixXS family: nzwlg01.sixxs.net. This PoP is located at Advanced Computer Solutions in Wellington, New Zealand. This PoP is available for all users from New Zealand. Further details about the PoP can be found on the ACSData PoP Page.

Because of this new PoP, SixXS is now present on 3 continents and can truly be called a 'Global Tunnel Broker'. A lot of thanks must go to all the participating ISPs who are making this possible, and are helping in providing quality IPv6 to the world! Without their support this would not have been possible. Thanks!

To celebrate this new PoP, the SixXS logo will be upside down for some time as we are now also available Down Under, it is the first PoP below the equator and it is also really on the other side of the planet from where we started out from.

We have opened the #sixxs.net discussion channel on IRCNet this to facilitate an even more involved community, which can already discuss openly on the Forum, but now also in a more direct way on IRC. We hope that this allows users to help each other faster and to have a quicker feedback loop. Of course for direct inquiries and feedback, email to info@sixxs.net remains the primary method of contact.

Part of SixXS will be lounging around at CCC Chaos Communication Camp 2007, thus in case you have questions/comments/etc or just want to come over and say hi, don't hesitate to drop in and have a drink with us.

Signing up or just signed up, but want to directly get started with a Tunnel and a Subnet? Then provide us with a link to either your LinkedIn and/or XING profiles. The details shown in those profiles allow us to easily verify your data for which in turn you will receive bonus credits, we respect hard working people.

The #sixxs.net discussion channel which was in trial phase, has become a permanent spot to place comments and questions now that a regular number of people are present. We've removed the #noc.sixxs.net channel as the #sixxs channel already provides the same information. Of course for direct inquiries and feedback, email to info@sixxs.net remains the primary method of contact.

To help promote the visibility of IPv6 enabled Toys that are available, we have set up a IPv6 Toys Gallery. The gallery contains devices that are IPv6 enabled along with their description and possible uses. Links to the vendor's pages where available are present allowing one to take a quick in-depth look into these toys. Like all other SixXS resources, if you have more, details about, IPv6 Toys, don't hesitate to contact us.

Five years ago, at the AMS-IX IPv6 Awareness Day we opened the virtual doors to SixXS. We started out with 3 PoPs: Concepts (nlams01), IPng (nlams02) and AMS-IX PoP (nlams03).Over the last 5 years some PoPs became decomissioned and quite a number of PoPs followed. The SixXS system now governs a grand total 24 PoPs, providing 8000+ tunnels to users in more than 60 countries.

In the coming couple of weeks we will be releasing a new AICCU, with a new GUI and some special features.

In the world of 6, the fifth birthday is a prelude to the sixth birthday which will be the big bang.

There are also a number of other specials coming up, we will reveal these in the coming weeks...

From the Secret Working Group comes a great song about IPv6 performed by Gary Feldman:


See the Secret Working Group page for the full lyrics.

As per user request and partially also because we had been thinking of opening one before, we have now opened up our own Wiki targeted at end-users using IPv6. This Wiki is there for users to store their (horror) stories, experiences, configurations, setups, usages, problems about everything as long it is in the area of IPv6 related. We have chosen for the very popular MediaWiki system which is renonwed for amongst others Wikipedia. The authentication system is linked indirectly to the SixXS system, which means that one requires a SixXS account to be able to edit pages. Because of this (bot-) spam will be null and it is of course another incentive to get a SixXS account. Email notifications are enabled so one can watch articles. Uploading is also permitted enabling one to add imagery and other information to articles.

We are very proud to present, during this 5th year of operation, the 25th Point of Presence for SixXS: uschi02. uschi02 is hosted by Your.org, Inc. who are a high bandwidth consultation, management and hosting services provider. The PoP is located in Chicago, Illinois, United States of America. It is available to all North American users. Full PoP information can be found on the Your.org PoP page

Unfortunately we have been notified of the following article on The OpenBSD Journal: Dr. Jun-ichiro "itojun" Itoh Hagino

Jun-ichiro "itojun" Itoh Hagino passed away on October 29, 2007 at the age of 37.

To those in the BSD communities he was simply Itojun, best known in his role as IPv6 KAME project core researcher. Itojun did the vast majority of the work to get IPv6 into the BSD network stacks. He was also instrumental in moving IPv6 forward in all aspects through his participation in IETF protocol design meetings. Itojun was helpful to everyone around him, and dedicated to his work. He believed and worked toward making technology available to everyone. He will be missed, and always remembered.

Itojun was one of the core people who really got IPv6 rolling, without the KAME IPv6 stack, none of the BSD's, Mac OS X and a variety of other platforms would have had had IPv6 support today. He was also the author of several books and not to forget the great Implementing AF-independent application document which is a basis for many networking projects.

Rest in piece Itojun, honorable IPv6 Samurai, you are already missed.

With deep respect,
  SixXS