News of 2010

First off, SixXS wishes everybody a happy and fruitful 2010!

We are planning quite some improvements to the SixXS service, and the website in general which should relieve some of the frustations of users, and also lower the load on the info@ mailbox quite a bit which gets drowned with people not being able to read and thus sending mails about things which are described on the website.

• New user signup/states: Get a password directly from the signup page which asks only for your name + country. This will allow forum access so one can participate there. One can then provide full user details (address, phone etc) and submit them for verification. After verification has been done by a member of the admins one will get the ability to request and use tunnels and also score posts on the forums, of course all manually verified still, this as humans are much better at decisions especially with the complex ruleset that we have because of the policies of each PoP.
• Being rejected means thus that one will have that status also in the userhome and that one can update the details there and resubmit for verification.
• User Details (address,phone) can be updated through the website.
• Accounts can be migrated from 6BONE to RIPE or SixXS through the website.
• Bounced emails can be resolved by logging in (one hopefully still has the password), optionally setting a new password and requesting a mail verification test.
• We will allow for account merging for all those people who didn't understand that we really only allow one account per person, we'll give most people a second chance, except those people who tried to fake their signup or abused the service.
• Private Tickets: Submit a ticket which will not be public, but only visible to SixXS. Allows one to submit a problem and see what the status is later on, having a clear path, and easier for SixXS as quite some details will be available directly, for instance lots of people don't even bother to provide their username let alone the other details we really require to even start helping one.
• User ranking based on support points: users can state that a post is cool and give points for that.

Of course, these things will come in due time which means when the SixXS staff of two has spare time to add these features. It seems that a lot of people simply assume that every site on the Internet is a commerically run entity with lots of paid staff behind it who are working on their problems 24/7. For those people just yet another reminder: SixXS is a big hobby project run by two people in their spare time; just like you are most likely using IPv6 in your spare time. Thus be happy what we are able to provide and do realize that we are unfortunately not able to cater to everybody's whims as time is the most precious thing in one's lifetime and we won't spend it on people who whine or abuse our service as like you we have better things to do, like for instance helping out people who do deserve it. If one cannot agree with that or cannot be happy with that, then please realize that there are actually commercial entities that provide a similar service and one can always go there instead.

That said, requests for improvement and other such things can always be discussed in the forum or more specifically the special "SixXS: What can be done better?" thread.

Last but definitely not least: thanks to all the ISPs providing PoPs for making SixXS possible.

We proudly open a new German PoP for Netcologne customers. This enables all Netcologne customers to get IPv6 connectivity from their own ISP. The PoP is located in the Netcologne datacenter in Köln, Germany, directly connected to their core network thus providing superb connectivity.

Please see the Netcologne (decgn01) PoP page for more details about this PoP.

Existing SixXS users who have signed up with a @netcologne.de email address or have a tunnel endpoint in Netcologne space will receive an email with an offer to move their current tunnel to the new PoP.

As per the tentative NANOG 48 Agenda there will be a SixXS presentation at NANOG48, Austin, Texas, USA which runs from the 21st till the 24th of February 2010.

Jeroen and Pim got together to discuss the 2010 roadmap for SixXS and what we'd like to do with the system. Over the years some of the added components had been gathering a bit of dust, and SixXS deserves a little attention. Our time is limited, so we have tried to prioritize what we spend our time on, and this inevitably lead to our decision to discontinue a set of (less used) sub-projects:

• The Torrent Tracker. We started this project when there were not many trackers and clients at all. By now, there are several dozen IPv6 enabled torrent clients - our work in this area is done.
• The Tor mirror. Tor is a great system for anonymous browsing, but we decided to re-focus our efforts on what we believe should be our core business: serving IPv6 connectivity to users.
• TINC as a tunnel type (2 tunnels in total :) as we now have AYIYA and it is widely adopted (in fact, we have more of those tunnels than we have static tunnels!)

Additionally, we've started to move our CVS repository into an SVN server. There are several reasons, but it largely has to do with the ability to set symlinks and properties on files (our website has quite a few symlinks), and Pim was adamantly advocating it :-)

In an attempt to regulate load and maintain reliability, we're starting to run a multi-tiered webserver architecture: Frontended by NGINX, loadbalanced via haproxy, and backended by not one, but a set of Apache servers. We're tying this all together with a configuration management system which pushes the various files and configs to the servers without human intervention (because we all know how easy it is to make typo's, and with an N-way distributed server system, some form of config management is a requirement to keep ones sanity :).

All of this serves three purposes:

1. Serve the user. Make it faster, and keep it up despite possible server failure
2. Serve the staff. Work around single points of failure so there is no acute need to fix stuff if the noc or webserver breaks
3. Clean up our attic. This allows us to make a good start at new projects, in a more controlled and scalable fashion.

Please bear with us while we try to not break the website, and keep downtime at a minimum while we move around physical machines and (web)servers - this should take a few weeks, and we expect to have our spring cleaning and refactoring and moving around done by the end of this Q1 2010.

We're doing this in the interest of a better user experience and a more scalable architecture for our service. We're doing it because we care!

With thanks to various CACert Assurers we have now been able to request a 2 year long CACert SSL certificate. This one is now being presented to your browser

SixXS has a new e-mail address policy. In the last year, we've seen more and more ISPs do not provide e-mail addresses for their customers, and we realise that customers are more mobile these days, so they would lose their ISP provided e-mail address. We're also aware that hosted e-mail solutions (such as Yahoo, GMX, Hotmail and Google Mail) are popular and rather stable. But on the other hand, we have noticed an increase in home-run mailservers (behind cable modems, DSLs and so on) and we've found that these addresses are more likely to generate bounces.

Please see the FAQ for a new aproach on what's hot and what's not e-mail address wise!

We are extremely proud to present yet another PoP, this time in Uberlandia, Brazil provided by Companhia de Telecomunicações do Brasil Central.The PoP is generally available for inhabitants of South America. We hope that this will further IPv6 deployment a lot more in that region.

Details about the PoP can be found on the brudi01 PoP information page.

If you are able to read Portuguese, then don't forget to peek at IPv6.br which is an excellent IPv6 resource

In the midst of a snow covered landscape we proudly open a second Swiss PoP in Zurich: chzrh02.sixxs.net. This PoP is provided by Init7. The PoP is available for all Swiss users and should alleviate the issues some users have when connecting to chzrh01 Further details about the PoP can be found on the Init7 PoP Page.

We have updated the Tunnel Information page (user home and then select the tunnel from the list) to provide more details and hopefully clearer options. The page also now has an option to set a per-tunnel TIC password. When set this password can then be used with AICCU, the login, which is combined of the handle + tunnel-id locks the TIC session to the Tunnel ID, access to other tunnels is not possible. The per-tunnel TIC password is separate from the main SixXS password and thus can provide a bit of extra security.

From now on you will be able to login using your email address next to your registry handle. This is valid for both the website and the TIC service, thus one can also use it in AICCU configurations.

We have also resolved issues surrounding images in the wiki which where not properly working. Due to our backend system though we cannot allow user uploads anymore, thus if you want to add an image to an article, don't hesitate to send it to us.

Another minor update one might notice is the login/password at the top of the menu bar which now also is a bit smaller to make better use of the screen estate, enjoy.

We are making a copy available of the book by InfoWeapons Chairman and CTO Lawrence E. Hughes called The Second Internet. Further details about the book can be found on the book's website The Second Internet, but you can download it directly from our archives in PDF format.

Today we officially open the doors of the Entreprise des Postes et Telecommunications PoP in Luxembourg. The PoP is generally available for inhabitants of Europe.

Details about the PoP can be found on the lulux01 PoP information page.

We are hereby announcing a new PoP in Chicago, USA hosted by Team Cymru. The PoP is generally available for users in the United States

Details about the PoP can be found on the uschi03 PoP information page.