As of June 2011, I am no longer employed by AussieHQ. This post is for reference only.
As some of you may know, the AussieHQ data network has been IPv6 enabled for approximately 3 months now.
In that time I have been working on developing a set of procedures for provisioning and managing our IPv6 resources, as well as what exactly is required for both shared and dedicated services to utilise IPv6.
I firmly believe that IPv6 is a classic example of the chicken and the egg dilemma. While IPv6 has been around since the late 1990s, content providers such as AussieHQ have not yet deployed the technology because there haven’t been enough people viewing IPv6 content to justify the effort.
To make matters even worse, ISPs aren’t providing IPv6 enabled connectivity because there are no major content providers out there providing IPv6 content.
As part of our effort to break out of this cycle, we are now slowly rolling out IPv6 across our network. Our main web site is IPv6 enabled, along with several dedicated servers and our Australian PHP mirror at http://au.php.net/.
Unfortunately we still have the issue where the various software that we use to manage aspects of our shared hosting environment will only support IPv4. This means that we may be unable to roll out IPv6 to sites on our shared hosting network until the vendor software supports it.
This web site has been IPv6 enabled as a test site to determine what exactly is required to activate the technology on our shared hosting network, as well as provide a test case to evaluate what does and does not work in a shared hosting environment.
I’ll be sure to post more on this as my experiments continue. In the meantime, if you have any questions please contact me.