Retiring test-ipv6.com

TL;DR: I will retire test-ipv6.com in December 2025.

I have provided test-ipv6.com to the public since 2010. I've sunk significant resources - engineering, support, equipment, and hosting fees - into what is a revenue-free product.

Without going into details: I feel now is the time for me to refocus my resources within the family.
I hope people will understand, and respect this decision.

I am shutting the site down, with a target of "during winter break" (December) 2025.

Mirror operators: Should you wish to keep your mirrors up, they will stop getting updates in December.

Service providers: If you have runbooks for your support team based on this site, or based on RIPE-631, you'll need to update those.

FAQ:

Q: Will I (jfesler) transfer the source?

A: This is a two part answer.

These are already public.
http://github.com/falling-sky/source
https://github.com/falling-sky/fsbuilder - used to build what's in source
https://github.com/falling-sky/mod_ip - the /ip/ handler for Apache
https://github.com/falling-sky/mtu1280d - the synthetic MTU180 netfilter daemon.

These have been open for years. But, honestly, hardly touched except when something in the world breaks what we do.

There's a big list of things that's not public - and, won't ever be, due to limitations in my employment contract.

Q: Will I (jfesler) transfer the domain?

A: Not easily.. I have a number of concerns.

1: The replacement would have to run well, around the world.
2: I don't have time to vette out who would/could take it, and if they have the technical ability to do it justice.
3: I can't really provide support in doing so, because.. Employment contract.

I don't want the domains (which rank excellently in Google) to get compromised into serving either bad ads or malware. It's better for me to sit on the domains, defanged, until their value drops.

Q: So you say there's a chance?

A: I'd consider a reputable RIR or NIC organization serving the public interest taking things over, if that could be done without time resourcing from me.

Q: What about RIPE-631?

A: I would have hoped 10 years after its publication, and 13 years after the World IPv6 Launch, that deployment problems would be a thing of the past. Alas. Sorry!

Q: Should mirrors be retired?

A: I would suggest it.

Note that if you keep it up, I won't be providing updates; nor will my monitoring remain active to let you know if your mirror is working correctly. Given the number of things that can go wrong, it's a concern about the site giving wrong info to users.

Q: How do I enable the retirement banner on my mirror?

Update your /site/config.js to add this "retire" variable:

"site": {
  "retire": true,
  "name": "test-ipv6.com",
  "contact": "Jason Fesler",
  "mailto": "jfesler@test-ipv6.com"
},

Q: What's so special about monitoring?

For HTTPS alone we actually do 50 distinct checks. Making sure every form of query returns the right headers, right response. Making sure that it answers when it should, and doesn't otherwise. Validating the DNS setup. Validating the MTU1280 emulation. For HTTP, add in another 50 checks. I do literally 100 queries every 5 minutes currently to each mirror.

Q: What's so hard about running more than one instance?

A: To be blunt: the expectation of HTTPS everywhere. The move from HTTP to HTTPS was generally a good thing, but it broke features of test-ipv6.com; and made trying to get certificate automation incredibly painful.

For a small web site, certs are easy. Run certbot, done. Or similar. LetsEncrypt has done a lot of good.

For what I do, though, it's a challenge to answer the challenge request/response, when I don't know which mirror will receive the challenge. So, there's a bit of shenanigans to make it work, including a custom ACME client implementation to handle the renewals.

There's also GSLB - but, there are commercial appliances that can do that, and also available internet services. I have my own GSLB implementation simply as a matter of cost control.

Q: Why not just one beefy single instance?

A: That would indeed be simpler, and could work if a few countries were blocked (abuse). But, the tests would be less reliable, as they are timing based. And, timings are very different for someone close to the web site vs the other side of the planet.

Q: What support problems do you have?

A: Ask me over beer some day. I'm not to call people out publicly, not even by trait. I can say that very few questions in the last several years were technical, much less about IPv6.

I've also had to deal with legal threats from people who don't get how things work. Thankfully, none escalated to physical.

Q: Why not run ads to sponsor the site?

A: I have a nearly religious objection to this. There's enough advertising in the world. I can't stand it. I won't add to it.

Q: Would you take contributions to help keep the site up?

A: No. That would likely contradict my employment contract.

Q: You sure seem worried about your employment contract.

A: I have a family to support, and a retirement to fund.

Q: I have more questions!

A: I'm sure. If we ever meet for coffee or beer, ask me then!

Q: Should you mirror the code and keep your mirror up?

It is open source. You can fork the project and do your own improvements.
Note: I was never a great javascript developer. I made it work. But that code's not a pretty thing.
There's also a lot of supporting stuff that I can't publish.

It may be challenging to adopt this code.

Plus, I won't be running the monitoring to make sure your site's 100%.