The Official Wireshark Blog

We’re not Participating in World IPv6 Day. Mostly.

· 410 words · 2 minutes to read
Categories: Info Infrastructure

Tomorrow is World IPv6 Day, the largest full-frontal test of IPv6 to date. It is going to be a historic event. It’s also one in which wireshark.org will and won’t be participating.

In one sense every day is IPv6 day here and tomorrow will be just another day. Most of our web sites (anonsvn, ask, this blog, bugs, buildbot, sharkfest, and wiki) have been fully dual-stacked for some time. You can reach them over both IPv4 and IPv6 and so far it’s been working pretty well. The big exception to this is the main web site, which still only has an A record. We can add an AAAA record at any time, but I’ve been holding off doing so until well *after* World IPv6 Day.

My concern is that having an AAAA record in place for www.wireshark.org tomorrow will cause unnecessary problems. If anyone runs into trouble reaching dual-stacked sites I don’t want to impede their ability to troubleshoot the problem by making Wireshark difficult to download.

We’ll add the AAAA record for www.wireshark.org in a few weeks.

P.S. According to the SCM revision logs IPv6 support was introduced in Wireshark in 1998. Tomorrow’s test is long overdue.

Comments 🔗

Comment by reddy on 2011-06-12 08:30:16 +0000 🔗

make sense.

Comment by Smat Testing on 2011-06-14 00:17:12 +0000 🔗

IPv6 good

Comment by guilleme on 2011-06-14 18:58:11 +0000 🔗

All ipv6 is looong overdue.
It started being needed many, many years ago.

Comment by Byte on 2011-06-15 07:56:52 +0000 🔗

I’d suggest creating a separate domain http://www.wiresharkipv4.org with only an A record, and http://www.wiresharkipv6.org with only a AAAA record. Not only handy for testing, but also ensures the site can be reached.

Comment by Gerald Combs on 2011-06-15 11:50:58 +0000 🔗

@Byte we have ip4.wireshark.org (A) and ipv6.wireshark.org (AAAA). They are primarily used by the IPv4/IPv6 connectivity test in the upper right corner of the pages on the web site, but you’re free to use them to connect to the site using your browser. Will that work?

Comment by NickC on 2011-07-08 04:49:31 +0000 🔗

While websites can often respond to more than one name, there is always issues for HTTPS – with certificate name mismatches if the Hostname doesn’t match. As the SSL certificate exchange happens before there is any HTTP sent on the connection, the Host can’t offer multiple certificates, based on the Hostname that will appear only once the SSL connection has been established.
So the wireshark website doesn’t work well via alternative names.