News of 2009

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The SixXS staff wishes everybody a happy and fruitful 2009.

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We tend to hear from people that they would rather not sign up for SixXS because they don't want their private details exposed. To solve this issue, we have added an option for all -SIXXS handles to make the address, phone, email and URL private. When this option is enabled, these details will then not be available anymore through the SixXS whois database (whois.sixxs.net). Your name will still be available though and associated to your IPv4 and IPv6 addresses. We do keep this information in our database and still require them to be correct.

New users can enable this option at signup time of their -SIXXS handle, existing users with -SIXXS handles can change this in the User Info section of their User Home. Users with non -SIXXS handles have their data already published by their registry's whois database. In that case one can change their handle to a -SIXXS handle. Do note that one has to take care of removing the original handle themselves.

As explained in the FAQ, we require this information as you get live Internet address space from us. In the event of abuse or other problems we need to be able to provide this information to the relevant authorities. This is the same as signing up to a 'normal' ISP, eg your cable or DSL provider.

We hope that by adding this feature a lot more users can consider SixXS and start using IPv6 this way.

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We have enabled monitoring on the ntp.sixxs.net and ntp.{eu|ap|us}.sixxs.net NTP server pools. As such, any NTP server which is not responding properly or is not stratum 1,2,3 is automatically removed from the pool. Thus ensuring that the pool contains correctly functioning NTP servers. Status of the pools can be seen on the Globally distributed IPv4 and IPv6 NTP service page which also contains more details.

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Like previous years Concepts ICT has donated us a new noc.sixxs.net machine, this time consisting of a dual-core 1.86hz Intel Xeon 3040 Conroe CPU with 2 GiB of memory in a new stylish 1U case.

We'd like to graciously thank Concepts ICT for sponsoring this new hardware! Concepts ICT also runs the Concepts PoP and colocates the noc.sixxs.net machine in their colocation facility in Breda, The Netherlands providing for free traffic and bandwidth to run the central SixXS site.

During the next two/three days we will be moving services over from the old to the new machine. This will mean that some services will not be available for short periods. We will be trying to keep the down time to a minimum.

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The hardware upgrade, which included moving all the data from the old host to the new host, different disks etc) has been completed and all services should be fully operational again.

In case you find a problem with any of the SixXS services, like usual, don't hesitate to contact us.

We have to extend a lot of thanks to Concepts ICT for this upgrade and the continual hosting and great support on-site!

(and now on with trying to get through all the mail backlog, mailing ~12.000 people and getting responses is not a quick case to handle)

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As the first /40 for uschi02 is now full, Your.org has additionally allocated 2001:4978:200::/40 to the PoP. Users who have requested prefixes previously and where in the queue have now already received new prefixes out of this block. All further requests for subnets on uschi02 will be allocated from there.

Due to the deployment of a new datacenter uschi02 will be moved to a new physical host in the next few days. This new host is several times more powerful than the current hardware that uschi02 runs on and thus should allow further growth to continue. A ticket will be opened when the exact details of the move are known. Expected downtime will be very short as it will be mostly a routing change to the new location.

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For a long time most of the pages on this website have been conforming to XHTML 1.1 Strict. We now have configured it according to the W3C's recommendation described in XHTML Media Types - Second Edition : 3. Recommended Media Type Usage. As such the webserver now returns the page based on the explicit presence of "application/xhtml+xml" in the HTTP Accept header with a Content-Type of "application/xhtml+xml". When a page is not conforming to XHTML 1.1 Strict this will cause an error in your browser. When this happens, please mail info@sixxs.net with the URL in question and we will resolve it.

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We have enabled IPv6 DNS cache resolvers for all SixXS users. As a nice carrot for you to use the resolvers we built, we've asked Google to add these resolvers to their trusted tester list, which means that when you use them, you will receive AAAA answers for queries like www.google.com and maps.google.com!

See the IPv6 Recursive DNSCache Services pages for more information, including how to configure your system to use the resolvers.

(No, this is not a April Fools Joke).

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Easynet, who are already providing the heavily used deham01 and bebru01 PoPs have provided us with a third PoP: deham02. The new PoP is also located in Hamburg, but physically hosted in a separate datacenter. We have closed new tunnel requests for deham01, preferring deham02 for new tunnels.

Thanks should go to the great people at Easynet who are provding such great support to this project.

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To make it easier to find out the PoP Status we have added both an RSS Feed and a Twitter Feed so that people are properly informed about these events.

We of course rather have that all PoPs are 'up', but unfortunately the Internet is a big place and computers do have their minds of their own and do not always cooperate. We do try to cooperate with the various ISPs to keep these downtimes to a minimum and resolve problems as quickly as possible, but unfortunately quick solutions are not always possible. We do hope that you keep on enjoying this free service.

Note that Twitter is an external service, connectivity between our robot and their service might not always function and failures might occur which are outside of our reach. As such, not all notifications/twits might thus make it on their system.

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The nlede01 PoP at BIT BV has been growing great too and thus it saturated the first /40 of subnets. BIT BV has allocated, routed and DNS-delegated a seconds /40 towards the host. With that another 256 subnet requests can be satisfied. Thanks to BIT BV for their continuing support!

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We have updated the CACert certificate that we are using to a new one so that it will last again till next year.

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Concepts ICT has brought us an early Xmas present and donated us a new machine for the IPv6Gate: gatey.sixxs.net. The machine will be running a dedicated IPv6Gate instance and relieving their PoP nlams01 of a bit of traffic caused by the IPv6Gate instance on that node. As this hardware is dedicated for IPv6Gate the gate should be quite a bit more performant. Enjoy!