One year on
It has been almost a year since my last post here. The first World IPv6 Day has come and gone. There is now a little more awareness of IPv6 - which is definitely a good thing. But looking back on what I was blogging about a year ago and I realise that very little has actually changed.
I helped out with getting South Africa's biggest technical news and discussion site turned up for IPv6. MyBroadband got a AAAA record just in time for IPv6 Day and since then its been uneventful. More on that another day.
I was quite surprised when talking to a local cloud server provider that they were under the impression that World IPv6 Day was the first time that IPv6 had been used for real stuff. Paraphrasing their response slightly: "The first tests with IPv6 were only completed a few weeks ago. We don't think that there is any reason for us to be deploying such an immature technology"
Another person still stuck in the first phase of their mourning for the demise of IPv4 - DENIAL.
IPv6 Spam
I sometimes have mixed feelings for spammers. While I mostly despise them for the time and money they waste in my life - I can't help being a little impressed every now and again.
There has thus far not been any noticeable email spam hitting my mail server on its IPv6 address. This is a relief since the availability of IPv6 RBLs and other spam fighting filters is currently limited.
I was however privileged to receive my first IPv6 comment spam on this blog recently. This means that one of the botnet herders has either included IPv6 support in their code or they are writing good enough code that it is IP version agnostic. Is this a good thing...?
I had hoped that the IPv6 Internet would be free of the evils of the IPv4 Internet. As long as it stays niche there will be no reason for the worst netizens to show their faces on this side of the great IP divide. Then of course we would not be achieving our end goal of moving everyone (including the spammers) to IPv6.
PING6 blog is reachable on IPv6
I've finally finished getting apache working with IPv6 and vhosts. It has been a little bit of a challenge under cPanel but I will talk more about that at a later date.
For right now though - PING6 is reachable over IPv6! Which should be a pre-requisite for running a blog about IPv6
IPv6 is now coming into the main stream. I'm using the IPv6 versions of Google, YouTube, Facebook and numerous other sites daily. My mail comes in and out over IPv6 and hopefully soon I will be able to function normally on the Internet with only an IPv6 connection thanks to NAT64. More on that in the coming months.