Technical Computing
by John Lalande
SSEC participated in World IPv6 Day on June 8th. IPv6 is the next-generation Internet Protocol, support of which will become increasingly important as the last remaining IPv4 addresses are allocated and the world shifts to IPv6.
SSEC's Technical Computing group enabled IPv6 networking for SSEC a few weeks ago and has been testing it since then. Those of you here in the building on the SSEC network can now access IPv6-enabled web sites, such as http://ipv6.google.com/ or http://test-ipv6.com/
Several large websites and Internet Service Providers are participating in World IPv6 Day, including Google, Facebook, Yahoo! and others, so if you visit those sites today from the SSEC network, you will be connecting via IPv6. World IPv6 Day should be seamless to you as a end-user, but if you do notice problems visiting websites, please email unix.admin@ssec.wisc.edu or stop by room 439.
In addition to enabling computers on the SSEC network to reach IPv6-enabled web sites, we have also turned on IPv6 on our own web server, www.ssec.wisc.edu. We have tested connecting to the SSEC web server from off-campus and are confident that the change should go unnoticed by virtually all visitors to our web sites. However, if you do get reports from folks unable to reach a SSEC website, please forward those along to us, as well.
Please note that the UW wireless network ("UWnet") and Madison area Internet Service Providers (AT&T, Charter, and TDS) are not yet IPv6-enabled and are still using the current IPv4 standard. And that's fine -- when services like Google, Facebook and Yahoo! enable IPv6, it is in addition to, not in place of IPv4. So, the only thing you're missing out on -- for now -- is being able to go to http://test-ipv6.com/ and see two 10/10 scores.
If you have any questions, concerns, or comments, please don't hesitate to drop us a note.
