Google and IPv6 Day

June 8, 2011 is the official worldwide IPv6 day. This “special” day is intended to increase awareness and there by adoption of the IPv6 protocol.

In admirable support for IPv6 world day many major sites, including Google and Facebook just to name a couple, are enabling IPv6 on their main sites, for 24 hours. These aren’t IPv6 only but rather IPv4 and IPv6 in what is referred to as a dual stack configuration. This way, the sites will be reachable via both IPv4 and IPv6 protocol users. So, why they are only doing it for 24 hours seems a bit of a mystery. But, that’s not the point of this post.

Google, in anticipation of IPv6 day is running tests in advance. They are putting up a banner at the top of www.google.com announcing the big day and offering a link to test your connection. This “banner ad” worked on the Net Codger and he clicked the link just to see what it was all about. After all, the Net Codger already knew well that there was no IPv6 connectivity between his machine and the outside world. Neither the Codger’s firewall/router nor his ISP provide IPv6 support at this time.

So the Net Codger was quite surprised to see Google announce a successful IPv6 test between the Net Codger and Google’s test site. Opening up Wireshark, a network protocol analyzer, the Codger repeated the test to see if perhaps Google was implementing an IPv4 to IPv6 tunnel of some kind. But, analysis showed that it was all IPv4. There was no IPv6 involved.

So, what’s going on here? Did Google screw up the test? Is this some sort of trickery from Google? Whatever it is, it is all very strange.

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