By now, the majority of active Internet users are aware that in the coming years a new version of the internet protocol – IP version 6 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv6) – will gain adoption next to the current IP version 4. Moving to a more modern technology is supposed to prevent a shortage of Internet addresses and also introduce many useful innovations.
Our technical team at Zone has also been implementing the new Internet protocol into our infrastructure. Part of the preliminary work for IPv6 was done January this year, during our network upgrades. During the rest of the year we have brought IPv6 support closer and closer to our clients. Some of our enthusiastic Dedicated Server and Housing clients have already put IPv6 subnets to use.
In October we will be update our platform further and all updated servers will gain a globally routed IPv6 address.
This upgrade impacts the our Webhosting and Smart Dedicated Server customers. After the update, any outgoing connections from servers, will support IPv6 in addition to IPv4 . If our server tries to establish a connection to a host and learns that the target has an IPv6 address, the first attempt to connect to the host will be made via IPv6.
We do not foresee IPv6 connectivity problems at Zone from our side. We have established complete global IPv6 routing tables in our routers and have secured connectivity for the 6th version of the IP protocol via two independent service providers – Linxtelecom and Cogent.
This update change may lead to problems only if you use an Internet application which is trying to communicate with a host that’s set up incorrectly. For example, if an attempt is made to connect to a host with an IPv6 address and in actuality the host has no IPv6 connectivity. In cases like these, there are three options for further action:
* contact the owner of the host and ask them to remove the faulty IPv6 DNS record;
* contact the owner of the host and ask them to create / restore IPv6 connectivity;
* modify your script so that it always connects to an IPv4 address.
For the time being we will not add IPv6 addresses to DNS zones used for incoming connections. Making several major changes at the same time could lead to confusion.
If you want to test Zone’s IPv6 connectivity and provide us feedback, you can do so by establishing a connection to host web.zone.ee using ping6 or traceroute6.