At 9:21 AM -0400 5/29/07, Donald Stahl wrote:
At this point, ISP's should make solid plans for supplying customers with both IPv4 and IPv6 connectivity, even if the IPv6 connectivity is solely for their web servers and mail gateway. The priority is not getting customers to use IPv6, it's getting their public-facing servers IPv6 reachable in addition to IPv4. Exactly.
So many people seem to be obsessed with getting the end users connected via IPv6 but there is no point in doing so until the content is reachable. The built in tunneling in Windows could be a problem so let's start by using different dns names for IPv6 enabled servers- mail.ipv6.yahoo.com or whatever. Can anyone think of a reason that a separate hostname for IPv6 services might cause problems or otherwise impact normal IPv4 users?
There are already folks who have run separate hostnames for IPv6 services, and the fact that we can still exchange email on mailing lists (lots of email ;-) ) means that it doesn't seem to be a problem. The next phase of experimentation which needs some real-world experience is using both IPv4 and IPv6 to reach existing servers, to learn all about the various "does and doesn't work" scenarios that can be setup with/out IPv6 transit/tunnelling, with IPv4 only and IPv4/IPv6 DNS servers, and the resource record preference rules in various resolver and IP stacks... So, what I'm advocating for is getting servers on both IPv4 and IPv6 asap, and figuring out how to do it safely with the same DNS names. I'm not saying that a good starting step is running IPv6 internal to your own network with separate hostnames, but we all have to move past that pretty quickly. /John