IPv6 deployment

IPv6, the successor to IPv4, features a greatly-enlarged address space. Despite its age and feature maturity, deployment of IPv6 on the public Internet is still ongoing.

The success of IPv6 is important for the preservation of the any-to-any internet, a technical characteristic of the Internet which is important to Wikimedia's mission and other decentralized or peer-to-peer information services.

For Wikimedia IPv6 deployment was relatively straight-forward as the majority of the software infrastructure already had solid IPv6 support. A small number of technical limitations, or lack of time for engineers to work on things, means that in some small corners of our infra we still rely on IPv4 but we are continually moving closer to having everything fully working over IPv6. All the main public-facing projects are available over IPv6.

Wikimedia participated in the World IPv6 Launch on June 6, 2012.

Current IPv6 deployment status

IPv6 network status at Wikimedia

• Wikipedia and most internet-facing services are available over IPv6 from all our core and caching POP sites.
• The entire Wikimedia network infrastructure runs dual-stack IPv4 and IPv6, meaning most internal traffic uses IPv6.

DNS servers

The authoritative nameservers ns(0-2).wikimedia.org all return AAAA records correctly, but due to concerns about the accuracy of IPv6 geo-ip maps versus those for IPv4 we have not made the DNS records available over IPv6 yet (see [1]).

IPv6 production testing at Wikimedia

• Ongoing testing for clients with broken IPv6 support using client side scripting on English Wikipedia. ipv6and4.labs.wikimedia.org (Decommissioned)

Fully IPv6 enabled services at Wikimedia

• lists.wikimedia.org (as well as the Wikimedia MXes). SSL does not work, however (bugzilla:22028)
• download.wikimedia.org
• svn.wikimedia.org
• bugzilla.wikimedia.org
• Gerrit code review
• toolserver.org
• Main production wikis - enabled as part of Wikimedia's participation in the World IPv6 Launch on 6 June 2012 (list of participants, announcement):
  • wikipedia.org
  • wikisource.org
  • wikibooks.org
  • wiktionary.org
  • commons.wikimedia.org
  • meta.wikimedia.org
  • species.wikimedia.org
  • incubator.wikimedia.org
  • wikiversity.org
  • mediawiki.org
  • wikiquote.org
  • wikimediafoundation.org
  • wikidata.org
  • wikivoyage.org

Known outstanding technical issues

• Interaction of broken dual-stack clients and AAAA records.
• Squid 2 IPv6 client support. (Avoidable by simply using another proxy in front of squid for v6) Squid 3.1 has full IPv6 support, however.
• MediaWiki user blocking support.

statistics related to deploying AAAA records

• results.labs.wikimedia.org

How to add IPv6 to a node

In site.pp:

 interface::add_ip6_mapped { 'main': }

or

 interface::add_ip6_mapped { 'main':
     interface => 'eth0',
 }