Ian Flint

Architect, Yahoo! Inc.

World IPv6 Day: What We Learned
9 minutes, 4.3mb, recorded 2011-06-16
Ian Flint

Last year the internet ran out of 32-bit IP addresses. Sharing IP addresses, as in the standard IPv4, has its problems, but who would volunteer to be the first to switch to the 128-bit standard, IPv6?

With all the IP addresses in IPv4 used up, the standard used NATs.  Most NATs map multiple private hosts to one public IP address.The problem here was handling (increasingly important) geolocation, and the rounding up of bad guys through the use of geolocation. Time to switch up! June 8, 2011 became World IPv6 Day, in which thousands of big sites switched to IPv6, with a dual stack fall-back to IPv4.

Ian Flint talks about how the switch went down at Yahoo: The standards they set, the user interfaces they prepared, and the tests they made in advance ... and how mistaking other hiccoughs in operation for IPv6 glitches might have caused them to ditch IPv6. In all, there are lessons in human and machine behavior in this talk.


Ian Flint is a 14-year veteran of the Internet. He has founded and sold two successful startups, and has been an architect at eBay and Yahoo. He is currently the service architect for communities and communications at Yahoo.

Resources:

 

This free podcast is from our Velocity Conference series.

For The Conversations Network:

Photo: Ian Flint's Facebook Profile