noticeboard.ru.ac.za

On Tuesday 8 June the Internet Society will be conducting global tests of the world's readiness for IPv6, and event they've coined World IPv6 Day. During this test a number of large websites, including Google and Facebook, will be IPv6-enabled.

Approximately half of Rhodes' campus is IPv6-enabled (primarily academic buildings between Prince Alfred St and Lucas Avenue - not residences or labs). Many people in these parts of campus already use IPv6 to access our internal services (such as e-mail) without realising it, and our experience is that this is mostly trouble free.

For the first time, however, there is an opportunity to access main-stream web sites using IPv6. In Rhodes' case, this will only apply to secure sites (https://), since non-secure sites will still use our IPv4-only proxy servers. We don't anticipate this will cause any problems, but please let us know if it does.

To see if you're using an IPv6-enabled PC, visit http://test-ipv6.com/. (You might need to restart your browser to get the IPv6 DNS names test to work - we've exempted them from the IPv4-only proxy).

For the record, Rhodes got its first IPv6 allocation on 13 February 2004 and have been actively using it on production servers since October 2005. It was one of the first South African universities to do so. The first IPv6-enabled service we made available to the Internet in general was incoming e-mail, followed shortly afterwards by DNS. On 19 September 2007, hippo.ru.ac.za became the first IPv6-enabled DNS server in South Africa to answer IPv6 queries for .za (and a number of other country-code top-level domains in Africa).

IPv6-support has been a standard criteria for evaluating new equipment for many years, and most of our core network supports it (we anticipate that we'll be able to support it campus-wide within the next six to twelve months).

Support for IPv6-enabled desktop computers was initially its scope limited to the IT Division and a few select departments, but since March 2009 we've been IPv6-enabling the networks in most academic buildings on main campus as a matter of routine. Most modern operating systems (Windows 7, Linux, OSX, etc) support IPv6 by default, and so it is likely that people in IPv6-enabled buildings are using IPv6 without realising it. (This is, of course, the intention.)

For various logistical and policy reasons we've deliberately refrained from IPv6-enabling the Student Network (i.e. residences) and public computer labs. However, it is likely that we'll do so in due course (and certainly well before it becomes a problem).