News of 2008
This page contains the news items from the year of 2008.
Happy new year
Tuesday, January 1st, 2008
SixXS wishes everybody a happy and fruitful 2008.
We directly have a great IPv6 announcement to make, relayed from ICANN:
On 4 February 2008, IANA will add AAAA records for the IPv6 addresses
of the four root servers whose operators have requested it. A
technical analysis of inserting IPv6 records into the root has been
done by a joint working group of ICANN's Root Server System Advisory
Committee and Security and Stability Advisory Committee, a report of
which can be found at http://www.icann.org/committees/security/sac018.pdf,
Network operators should take whatever steps they feel
appropriate to prepare for the inclusion of AAAA records in response
to root queries
This will most likely become the first IPv6 history point of 2008, hopefully more will follow.
IPv6 Glue for your domain
Sunday, January 20th, 2008
In about 3 weeks, the root-servers will have published IPv6 glue (AAAA) records.
This is a huge step to be able to run fully IPv6-only, thus without having to depend on IPv4.
Domains though then still need to have AAAA glue for their own DNS servers, and those of their TLD's.
We have started compiling a list of registrars who can provide you with this service, and also the ones who don't.
Please see Which DNS Registrars allow me to add AAAA glue for my Domain Name Servers?
Of course, if you have additions, don't hesitate to pass them on.
IPv6Gate 2.5 - Multi-part POSTing resolved
Tuesday, February 19th, 2008
Thanks to River from Wikimedia for notifying us to a bug which affected multi-part POSTs through the IPv6Gate.
After a bit of a fight this problem has been resolved and the IPv6Gate should now be fully functioning with Wikipedia again.
This thus allows everybody who has IPv6 to already access Wikipedia over IPv6 using our IPv6Gate.
Example Wikipedia direct access URL's:
We would like to remember people to actually contact us in case of problems, as when we don't know about a problem, we can't look at it and possibily fix it.
SixXS & AICCU in the c't - magazin für computertechnik
Saturday, March 1st, 2008
Faithful readers of the paper-copy of the excellent German c't - magazin für computertechnik magazine will most likely already have noticed that on page 214-219 there is an IPv6 article ("Mit IPv6 ins Internet") which also, in about one page, partially covers SixXS and AICCU. It even has a screenshot of AICCU and even a part of the website in the magazine.
For everybody who is able to read German, or when the English edition comes out with this article, check it out!
AICCU is also featured in their Software Verzeichnis (Software Directory).
More IPv6 Multicast Experiments
Wednesday, March 5th, 2008
We have recently given quite some love to the experimental IPv6 Multicast support. Most European PoPs should now be able to receive the IPv6 Multicast groups that are being broadcasted on the m6bone.
When one is reading about IPv6, don't forget to check up on the Google IPv6 Conference.
SixXS does Düsseldorf, Germany with a new PoP from SpeedPartner GmbH
Monday, March 10th, 2008
We proudly present a new German based PoP located in the city of Düsseldorf: dedus01.sixxs.net.
This PoP is located in SpeedPartner GmbH's Datacenter and is from now on available for all German users, thus allowing these users to pick between the Easynet PoP and the SpeedPartner PoP.
Further details about the PoP can be found on the SpeedPartner GmbH PoP Page.
Into the snowy mountains: a new PoP from IP-Man in Zurich, Switzerland
Monday, March 24th, 2008
In the midst of a snowy easter we proudly open the first Swiss based PoP in Zurich: chzrh01.sixxs.net.
This PoP is located at the TIX, hosted by IP-Man.
The PoP is available for all Swiss users and is also connected to the experimental ecmh multicast cloud.
Further details about the PoP can be found on the IP-Man PoP Page.
Current Swiss users will receive an offer to start using this PoP instead of their out-of-country based PoP.
With the opening of this PoP, SixXS is now present in 15 countries around the world.
Many thanks to all the ISPs providing the PoPs!
Free 10GE IPv6 Tunnels for everybody
Tuesday, April 1st, 2008
From today on SixXS is offering free 10GE tunnels for a massive amount of IPv6 connectivity.
You will now be able to download as fast as possible, in most cases several hundreds of times faster than with your existing IPv4 connection. This demonstrates that IPv6 is much faster than IPv4!
Your IPv6 Internet will never have been as fast as this!
Availability is subject to the amount of carrier pigeons that are not stressed out yet to carry your packets from your endpoint to the PoP and to the rest of the world and all the way back. No animals are being hurt in this process or by the carrying of DLT tapes.
Popping Scandanavia: Second Availo PoP opens in Oslo, Norway
Tuesday, April 29th, 2008
We are proud to open a new PoP in Scandanavia: noosl01.sixxs.net.
With this addition every Scandanavian country has their very own SixXS PoP
This new PoP is located in Oslo, Norway, hosted, like sesto01 by availo.
The PoP is available for all Norwegian users and is also connected to the experimental ecmh multicast cloud.
Further details about the PoP can be found on the Availo PoP Page.
Current Norwegian users will receive an offer to start using this PoP instead of their out-of-country based PoP.
SSL Certificate switched to CACert
Friday, May 23rd, 2008
We have switched SSL certificates to the ones from CAcert.
This, amongst others, allows us to have the complete webinterface to be available as (non-SSL) and https://www.sixxs.net (SSL) while also allowing the use of http://ipv4.sixxs.net / https://ipv4.sixxs.net and http://ipv6.sixxs.net / https://ipv6.sixxs.net the latter ones allow one to force an IPv4 or IPv6 version, which might be handy when either IPv4 or IPv6 connectivity is broken between you and the website.
When accessing the website, only the above hostnames are accepted, all others are redirected.
The certificate also allows us to finally use tic.sixxs.net in the name thus allowing us to also enable the TIC service with SSL in the next couple of months.
All logins and actions in the Home section now require SSL; this is enforced by the webserver.
By using a CACert certificate, we would also like to show our support for their project, especially as they share our mindset, though for a different subject: certificates, like IPv6 connectivity, should be freely available to anyone.
 Because certificates from CAcert are not yet included per default by all browsers and other such tools you will most very likely have to accept their root-certificate into your browser first.
Please install the CAcert root certificate from their site to avoid the certificate warning.
By installing their root-certificates all certificates siged by CAcert are automatically accepted by your browser.
SixXS fully reachable for IPv6 only hosts due to added IPv6 glue
Sunday, June 15th, 2008
Joker has made IPv6 glue registrations possible through their webinterface, this thus allowed us to also add glue for ns{1|2|3}.sixxs.net.
Because of this added glue, SixXS, including sixxs.{com|org|nl|de} and thus also the IPv6Gate is now fully reachable over any IPv6-only network.
Passed the 10.000 active users mark
Sunday, July 13th, 2008
We have passed the mark of 10.000 active users.
These users already have more than 10.000 active tunnels, and nearly 50% of them have a /48 routed over those tunnels.
See the Usage statistics, which shows that users come from 97 different countries,
Request statistics and Growth statistics for more
details on these numbers.
(Note that we are mentioning active users here, not people who sign up and then never actually use the service)
Decommissioning of usatl01 and uschi01
Friday, July 18th, 2008
usatl01 and uschi01 are being de-commisioned. Users who have not moved yet, even after previous notifications, can of course get a free transfer to another PoP by contacting SixXS.
See the upcoming news for good alternatives.
Highwinds providing four new US PoPs: Phoenix (AZ), Dallas (TX), Los Angeles (CA) and San Jose (CA)
Saturday, July 19th, 2008
The Highwinds Network Group Inc, known for amongst others their high performance content distribution network and their various Network News (NNTP) services,
are providing SixXS with four new PoPs on the west coast of the USA, namely in:
- Phoenix, Arizona
- Dallas, Texas
- Los Angeles, California
- San Jose
The Phoenix PoP is already live, the hardware for the other three PoPs are in transit and should arrive at the Highwinds colo-location facilities in their cities in the coming week.
We are announcing this now already so that people who are closer to those locations know about it and can hopefully keep their breath a short while longer till they are up and running, thus avoiding the first east-coast PoP to be overrun and thus spreading users of the PoPs.
The hardware for these PoPs have been provided by Wikimedia where these hosts where formerly part of the Tampa, Florida based cluster of Wikipedia.
These PoPs are/will be open for all users from the Americas with reasonable latencies.
As they are inside the network of Highwinds, they are of course very well connected to their news.ipv6.eweka.nl service, which contains
over 400 Terabytes of NNTP archives.
Further details about these new PoPs can be found on the Highwinds PoPs page.
We will post announcements when the other three go live.
SixXS at Internetdagarna 2008
Sunday, August 10th, 2008
There will be a presentation covering SixXS, or more in general end-user IPv6 connectivity at the upcoming Internetdagarna 2008, 21st and 22nd of October 2008 in Stockholm, Sweden.
There will be a number of other very interresting speakers there, thus don't forget to hop by.
Highwinds PoP in Dallas, Texas (usdal01) up and running
Sunday, August 24th, 2008
As previously announced, the Highwinds Network Group Inc PoP in Dallas, Texas, USA: usdal01, is now available for users.
AYIYA support in Wireshark
Wednesday, October 1st, 2008
Thanks to Jelmer Vernooij, of amongst others Bitlbee fame, Wireshark from SVN 26288 has AYIYA support, thus making debugging and monitoring AYIYA quite a bit easier.
Highwinds PoP in Los Angeles, California (uslax01) up and running
Wednesday, October 15th, 2008
As previously announced, the Highwinds Network Group Inc PoP in Los Angeles, California, USA: uslax01, is now available for users.
Tuesday, November 11th, 2008
The usage of dedus01 has been growing steadily and to be able to satisfy the subnet requests an additional /40 has been assigned by SpeedPartner GmbH.
Thursday, December 18th, 2008
SurfNet's nlams05 PoP recently also filled up the first /40 completely and SurfNet has assigned the PoP another /40 to satisfy further subnet requests.
Airwire PoP in Galway, Ireland opens up
Sunday, December 21st, 2008
We proudly present a new Irish PoP located on the west-coast of Ireland in Galway: iegwy01.sixxs.net.
This PoP is located in Airwire's Datacenter and is from now on available for all Irish users, thus allowing these users to pick between the HEAnet PoP and the Airwire PoP.
Further details about the PoP can be found on the Airwire PoP Page.
Leaseweb PoP in Haarlem, The Netherlands opens up
Sunday, December 21st, 2008
We proudly present a new Dutch PoP located near Amsterdam in Haarlem, The Netherlands: nlhaa01.sixxs.net.
This PoP is located in Leasweb's Datacenter and is from now on available for all Dutch users.
Further details about the PoP can be found on the Leaseweb PoP Page.
Jaguar PoP in Marseilles, France opens up
Sunday, December 21st, 2008
Bienvenue en France! We proudly present a first French PoP located in Marseille, France: frmrs01.sixxs.net.
This PoP is located in Jaguar Network's Datacenter and is from now on available for all French users.
Further details about the PoP can be found on the Jaguar PoP Page.
French users who are currently using another PoP will soon receive an offer to move to this PoP.
Monday, December 22nd, 2008
Availo's sesto01 PoP recently also filled up their first /40 completely and Availo has assigned the PoP another /40 to satisfy further subnet requests.
IPv6Gate 2.7 - URLs in posts fixed and now multi-instance
Tuesday, December 23rd, 2008
Recently it was brought to our attention that there was quite a silly bug in the IPv6Gate when using it in combination with Wikipedia, or for that matter anything where one could post URLs.
The problem was that the IPv6Gate would always append .sixxs.org to URLs, as such, edits to Wikipedia would end up also containing this "modification" which of course is not intended by the author or by us.
This problem has now been resolved so that edits should work fine again.
Though, please, when editting Wikipedia articles, do log in, that makes it easier for the admins of Wikipedia to see that you are not editing just anonymously which they might perceive as vandalism.
To ensure that the IPv6Gate service keeps up to speed with the large amount of users who are using the service we have enabled a second instance of the IPv6Gate. This way load to the IPv6Gate should be spread over these two instances by the simple principle of DNS rotation. DNS should slowly propagate throughout the internet and then you will be automatically be using either one of the two instances. In case demand grows we can easily add more instances to satisfy the needs of the users.
We would like to remember people to actually contact us in case of problems, as when we don't know about a problem, we can't look at it and possibily fix it.
We have documented the IPv6Gate now also on Wikipedia in its own article.This article has a Talk Page which can be used for reporting issues with the IPv6Gate, next to ofcourse directly contacting us.
Happy IPv6 surfing!
Availo PoP in Copenhagen, Denmark opens up
Thursday, December 25th, 2008
Velkommen til Danmark! We proudly present a first Danish PoP located in Copenhagen, Denmark: dkcph01.sixxs.net.
This PoP is hosted by Availo already known for sesto01 and noosl01.
Further details about the PoP can be found on the Availo PoP Page.
Danish users who are currently using another PoP will soon receive an offer to move to this PoP.
DNSSEC for reverse delegations (beta)
Friday, December 26th, 2008
We are proud to introduce DNSSEC support for the reverse delegations that are associated with one's subnet.
The web interface now allows you to upload your DS records for your delegations. Like the NS record delegations these will then be included inside our delegation zone, which is also DNSSEC signed and will soon hopefully be included in the ISC DLV registry.
When the DLV delegation is in place and stability of our DNSSEC is proven we will mark DNSSEC support as stable, for the time being DNSSEC support will be kept in beta state.
See the FAQ for some details on the signup and pointers to the excellent tutorials from the folks of DNSSEC Tools.
DNSSEC delegations in DLV Registry
Monday, December 29th, 2008
The delegations have been added to the ISC DLV registry.
As such, all these delegations can be DNSSEC verified now when having configured the ISC DLV registry is a look-aside zone.
We'll soon also be putting monitoring solutions in place so that one can see if the delegation, either with help of the DLV registry or directly from the upstream ISP, is properly verifyable; and the same for the delegation down to the user.
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