Update on IPv6

Hi all,

June 6, 2012 is IPv6 Launch ( http://www.worldipv6launch.org/ ). The goal of this global event is to move more ISPs, equipment manufacturers and web services to permanent adoption of IPv6.

We're planning to do limited production testing of IPv6 during the Berlin Hackathon 2012 (June 2-3). Provided that the number of issues we encounter are manageable, we may fully enable IPv6 on IPv6 day, and keep it enabled.

MediaWiki has been used with IPv6 by third party wikis for some time. Wikimedia uses a set of additional features (GlobalBlocking, CheckUser, etc.) which weren't fully IPv6-ready until recently. In addition, we're working to ensure that all of Wikimedia's various services (mailing lists, blogs, etc.) are IPv6-ready.

What's the user impact going to be?

At least in the June 2-3, 2012 time window, you may see a small number of edits from IPv6 addresses, which are in the form "2001:0db8:85a3:0000:0000:8a2e:0370:7334". See w:IPv6 address.

These addresses should behave as any other IP address would: You can leave messages on their talk pages; you can track their contributions; you can block them. CIDR notation is supported for rangeblocks.

An important note about blocking: A single user may have access to a much larger number of addresses than in the IPv4 model. This means that range blocks (e.g. address with "/64") have to be applied in more cases to prevent abuse by more sophisticated users.

In the mid term, user scripts and tools that use simple regular expressions to match IPv4 addresses will need to be adapted for IPv6 support to behave correctly. We suspect that IPv6 usage is going to be very low initially, meaning that abuse should be manageable, and we will assist in the monitoring of the situation.

User:Jasper Deng is maintaining a comprehensive analysis of the long term implications of the IPv6 migration here: w:en:User:Jasper Deng/IPv6

We've set up a test wiki where you can see IPv6 IP addresses. This works by assigning you a fake IPv6 address the moment you visit the wiki, and allows you to see the behavior of various tools with the new address format: http://ipv6test.wmflabs.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

The best way to report issues is to register them in Bugzilla and to ensure that they are marked as blockers for the IPv6 tracking bug: https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=35540

We'll post updates to wikitech-l and elsewhere as appropriate.

All best, Erik
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Erik Möller

VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation

(June 1, 2012)