Google and IPv6

[Dan Noe]

On Fri, Mar 14, 2008 at 07:58:41AM -0400, Fred Baker wrote:
> at the risk of sounding a trifle unthankful, I wonder whether the two  
> AAAA records could be added to that for www.google.com, making the  
> standard google search bar reachable by IPv6. It would be nice if as  
> a result of the relevant engineer's work Google now had a service  
> that was in common use and measurable by google in such a way as to  
> guide them to widen it over time.

My own personal experience with running a A/AAAA record host is that
many issues can crop up related to reachability and performance.  With
Linux, Mac OS X, and now Vista hosts autoconfiguring out of the box, a
broken route prefix announced means that a AAAA host can suddenly become
unreachable.  Of course, if the relay is properly replying with
no-route-to-host then the client will quickly fail over to IPv4 but if
it silently drops packets A/AAAA hosts are basically unreachable over
either.

Unfortunately, thus far it seems the vast majority of network admins
are unaware of this issue and when I raised it with a University admin
years ago they simply claimed they "weren't responsible for IPv6" and
refused to do anything to identify the party running the broken router.

Of course, if Google suddenly added A/AAAA records this issue would go
away a lot quicker since everyone would be acutely aware of it :) But I
don't think they want to deal with the negative consequences of reduced
reachability in the meantime.

Cheers,
Dan

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