IPv6 Test Lab at HPI

The Hasso Plattner Institute is hosting the German IPv6 Council, which promotes the adoption of IPv6 in Germany. At the Operating Systems and Middleware Group, we operated an IPv6 testbed since early on. The testbed enabled staff and students to experiment with deployment aspects of IPv6.

We conducted number of studies, for example:

• Operating IPv6-only systems: What kind of services would be available if systems where restricted to IPv6? Practically, today, systems should always be deployed in a dual-stack (IPv4 + IPv6) mode. However, it is interesting to see how much (or how little) one can achieve with a pure IPv6 system (provided there is some system with IPv4 connectivity in the network).
• IPv6 usage in the internet: On a number of web servers, we maintain statistics of how many users are connecting via IPv6. Currently, the usage pattern shows that IPv6 usership is smaller on weekends, indicating that people mostly use IPv6 from their work places, rather than from home.
• Configuration: a number of configuration issues are still not sufficiently resolved, such as establishing trust in router advertisements. They were not resolved for IPv4 either; however, IPv6 could, in principle, do better.