Now that I have finally moved in to my new apartment (which requires a long blog of its own), I have new routing equipment and a new network infrastructure. The native IPv6 on Cox Communications seems to be a bit better than the native IPv6 offered by Comcast Business; namely, Cox seems to be peered more widely and therefore ping times are much lower. Of course, this could be specific to the market I'm in - eastern Oklahoma - so YMMV.
However, because DHCP is a terrible protocol, it is constantly flaking, leaving me with IPv6-only access to the Internet. That is, no access to IPv4 whatsoever. Surprisingly, it's nearly usable. However, I am highly disappointed in a few surprises I've found that do not work over IPv6:
- EVERY SINGLE CODE HOSTING SERVICE ON THE INTERNET. This really, really, really, really upsets me. Luckily, I don't have to care any more, because I run my own now.
- DuckDuckGo. I am incredulous that a modern search engine is not accessible over IPv6.
- eBay and PayPal. This isn't really surprising, I suppose, since eBay were running Windows NT 4 as recently as 2006... they always have been a decade off of the current technologies.
- Any news Web site I tried: Bloomberg, BBC, New York Times, Washington Post.
- The entire StackExchange family of properties, five YEARS after being asked for even a trial of IPv6 access. This is entirely unacceptable. I expect news organisations and e-commerce conglomerates to be woefully behind the times, but a company designed from the ground up for computer scientists by computer scientists? I can't believe this is real.
- Weather.gov. The US government actually has an IPv6 project with real time online completion progress, even available itself via IPv6; however, while NOAA's flashy Web 3.0 marketing pages are available over IPv6, the important research, life-saving data, and forecast information made by the National Weather Service are entirely IPv4-only. I understand that internally, their infrastructure is not entirely ready for IPv6, but they should be able to run the main radar and warning information over IPv6 at least. Americans need not feel singled out, though; the UK's Met Office is also unavailable over IPv6.
At least Wikipedia and the Google properties are usable, so I have music, videos, and a reference library.
