IPv6 Test Lab at HPI
The Hasso-Plattner-Institut is hosting the German IPv6 Council,
which promotes the adoption of IPv6 in Germany. At the Operating Systems and Middleware Group, we
operate an IPv6 test bed, enabling staff and students to experiment with deployment aspects of
IPv6.
We have a number of ongoing studies:
- 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; as an example, see the statistics
of this webserver.
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.
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