IPv6 Status Survey
A number of years ago at a Joint Techs meeting at Fermilab Ron Broersma of Defense Research and Engineering Network (DREN) included a scorecard in his presentation that tried to quantify how well major organisations were embracing IPv6. I thought that this was such a fine idea that I’ve decided to replicate it here. I started by grabbing a list of organisations associated with Internet2 from their web site and tried to work out their domains.
I used to do the same thing for Australia but I’ve decide to merge it into this page too.
I've received a number of requests to add further organisations and so the page has just grown and grown. If you want to be added or notice an error with a domain name on the page then let me know.
The basic premise behind this test is that while some ISPs might argue that their networks support IPv6 (and that they use it every day) because they have an IPv6 prefix that is announced to the world I tend to believe in “eating ones own dog food” and so it’s more important to be seen to be using it in some meaningful way rather than potentially have a single host generate a suitable BGP announcement. Therefore like Ron I have identified some services and use them as an indicator of usage.
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1.Web server accessible via IPv6;
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2.Email deliverable via IPv6;
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3.DNS name servers accessible via IPv6;
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4.An NTP service accessible via IPv6; and
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5.A Jabber service accessible via IPv6
Partial points are awarded if you have an accessible “www.ipv6.$domain” site. I also now look for “ipv6.$domain” too and a number of other variants although I think a “normal” user would only try the regular name.
Similarly partial points are also awarded if a secondary MX supports IPv6 but the primary does not although in reality an IPv6 only host can communicate with the domain if the secondary is accessible via IPv6 and the secondary can then use some other method to reach the primary to deliver the email.
Partial points are also awarded if some but not all DNS name servers have IPv6 addresses. I attempt to check if it is the organisation who has the IPv6 accessible DNS servers or if it’s just a secondary (this falls down if the organisation uses a different domain for it’s services). The first set of numbers in the cell are the organisation’s DNS servers with IPv6 access and total. The second set are total IPv6 accessible DNS servers and total number of DNS servers.
For a NTP service I look for a AAAA record on “ntp.$domain” and if it exists I attempt to perform a “ntpdate” to it. If the stratum looks OK then you get a green cell.
For a Jabber service (xmpp-server and xmpp-client), this is tested by looking for an appropriate SRV DNS resource record. If there isn’t a record then the cell will be gray (status unknown). If there is only IPv4 addresses listed then the cell is red (fail). If both IPv4 and IPv6 are accessible or if they are both inaccessible, possibly caused by a firewall, that is claimed as success as the service from my view point is equivalent and the cell is green.
If the response for a client is different to a server then the status will be prefixed by "C:" or "S:". If only one is present then that means the second is "unknown".
When some Web and Mail sites fail to provide an IPv6 accessible service the "FAIL" is now followed by some letters in parentheses. This is used to indicate that the site is using a third party to provide that service and that third party doesn't provide an IPv6 service for them. This third party could be (A)kamai, (G)oogle, (M)c(A)fee, (M)essageLabs, (M)ac(Q)uarie, (M)icro(S)oft, (P)ostini, (P)roof(P)oint, (R)ed(C)ondor or (W)ebsense.
A gray cell indicates some, unspecified, problem with the data collection.
The list should update daily and suggestions for additions are welcome.
There is also a CGI script to test a domain that is not already in the list at