Hi Risker et al, a few important points: * IPv6 adoption is still below 1% globally [1]. * It's likely that we'll encounter network-level issues well before we hit application-level issues during limited production testing. * In the event that we manage to resolve all issues, it's likely that we'll only see very limited use/abuse of IPv6 addresses and that we'll have plenty of time to adjust procedures and documentation. * We can abort this fairly easily, or as Tim suggests, employ global blocks of IPv6 addresses to manage abuse.
As noted, the plan is to engage in limited production testing this weekend, with possible full deployment by IPv6 Day (Wednesday). I should also note that the degree to which all the complex network and software interactions of a deployment like this can be tested without actually changing or affecting production operations is limited. We're going to be debugging issues in real-time. I appreciate that this is very short notice for lots of people and apologize for that; thanks to Tilman for helping with the global notice dissemination. There's pretty good likelihood that aside from maybe some brief service interruptions, the user impact is going to be close to nil, either due to an abort early on, or due to very limited IPv6 usage. Moving towards full IPv6 support is part of our responsibility as a good Internet citizen, and this has been in the works for a long time. It's never been an option not to do this as IPv4 addresses are being exhausted. Regarding privacy, both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses can be dangerously revealing in terms of personal identity (e.g. some ISPs even tie street address information to your IPv4 address). It's always been fundamentally problematic that MediaWiki reveals this information nakedly, and it's what enabled past large-scale investigations like WikiScanner, for good and for ill. In the mid to long term, I believe we need to investigate moving away from full disclosure of IP addresses when editing without logging in, but this is independent of IPv4/IPv6. All best, Erik [1] https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics/ -- Erik Möller VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
