Friday, June 28, 2013

Microsoft blog - Ask Premier Field Engineering (PFE) Platforms

The Ask Premier Field Engineering (PFE) Platforms Blog has been doing some posts on IPv6 recently and they are worth checking out. They cover a lot more then just IPv6 but it nice to see that the Microsoft Premier Field Engineers understand how important IPv6 is to Windows. So kudos to the team and thanks for the posts.

Specifically, the did a post titled:
IPv6 for the Windows Administrator: Why you need to care about IPv6

and also:
IPv6 for the Windows Administrator: IPv6 Fundamentals

Both are worth the time to read and both were written by Mark Morowczynski.
- Ed

Monday, June 24, 2013

Cisco's TechWise TV - IPv6: Is it time?

Alain Fiocco and Kumar Reddy do a great IPv6 show with TechWise TV that you should check out. It is Cisco specific but it is still a great resource to watch and learn about what Cisco is doing around IPv6.



Both Alain and Kumar presented at the North American IPv6 Summit in Denver, CO in May 2013. You can check out their presentations at:
http://rmv6tf.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/4-2013-04-11-NA-IPv6-Summit-afiocco.pdf
http://rmv6tf.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/5-2013-04-17-RMv6TF-kreddy-02.pdf

Alain has some great information around global IPv6 adoption and you can get more information at Cisco IPv6 Lab Stats page at:
http://6lab.cisco.com/stats/

Kumar gives so awesome insights into what Cisco has done to tune their wireless solutions to work well with IPv6 clients.

It turns out they are both on Twitter too so follow them:
@alainfiocco
@kumarreddy

Also, Cisco's IPv6 Lab is providing the stats via a wiget plugin too which looks like:

Cisco 6lab IPv6 stats widget
You can get the widget code at:
http://6lab-stats.com/index.php

Enjoy!
- Ed

Wednesday, June 19, 2013

Update on Google IPv6 geo location issues

Turns out Google seems to turn around fixing the geo location issue pretty quickly. I tested again and it appears they have fixed it. And on an unrelated note, apparently attempting to log into your gmail via IPv6 can set off security alerts too. I got (filtered a bit of the message, so no quotes):

Someone recently tried to use an application to sign in to your Google Account - <filtered>@gmail.com.

We prevented the sign-in attempt in case this was a hijacker trying to access your account. Please review the details of the sign-in attempt:


Wednesday, June 19, 2013 2:09:31 PM UTC
IP Address: 2001:470:<filtered>:<filtered>:<filtered>:<filtered>:2b4d:163a
Location: United States


If you do not recognize this sign-in attempt, someone else might be trying to access your account. You should sign in to your account and reset your password immediately

If you need to submit a request to fix your IP geo location info with Google use this link:
https://support.google.com/websearch/contact/ip

- Ed




Tuesday, June 18, 2013

Some odd Google IPv6 geo location issue

It seems that Google's IPv6 geo location database isn't as clean as it needs to be and this has caused my family some grief over the last few weeks. I run dual stack at home and I run both my wired and wireless networks at home with IPv4 and IPv6. My older daughter just returned home from college and fired up her laptop and when she attempts to go to http://www.google.com she is redirected to http://www.google.com.tw which she found rather alarming. In addition, all her searches and links were coming back with Chinese characters and links obviously due to this. This seems to affect YouTube and all other Google services also.

Turns out the IPv6 tunnel broker I use from Hurricane Electric has assigned me out an IPv6 prefix from their Fremont 2 facility and for some odd reason the prefix is being tagged by Google as being located in Taiwan. This is the reason that the web request is being redirected to the .tw domain instead of the regular .com domain.

This isn't a huge deal for me as I can make tweaks to my daughter's laptop and fix the issue. For many others who may start to be provided IPv6 addresses as part of a nationwide rollout for their ISP this could be a HUGE problem. Granted, you would hope that Google would work with local service providers to keep that database relatively accurate but it seems Google hasn't yet responded to Hurricane's requests to fix it even though Hurricane has provided them with a full accounting of their IPv6 prefix locations (or it is my understanding that they have provided it.)

If you have problems with your IPv6 prefix not being properly geo located with Google you can submit your information at this link and see if it is fixed. A quick warning, the form doesn't take the /64 prefix portion, just the address so leave the prefix off. As a side note, this submission form works for IPv4 too.
- Ed