As part of its ongoing commitment to IPv6, the next generation of
Internet Protocol, Google will begin advertising IPv6 address (AAAA)
records, in addition to current A records, to the University of Maine
System network on the morning of Tuesday, April 14th.




This change will not affect service for the majority of UMS networks.




Over the last year Google has made an effort to make sure every service
it offers will work over IPv6.  As part of its deployment Google has
been reaching out to large networks with stable and mature IPv6 support
to participate in their rollout of IPv6-enabled services.

The University of Maine System has been routing IPv6 within our core for
several years, and over the last year has deployed IPv6 to edge networks
where requested.

While this is not a service affecting change, it could cause access to
www.google.com to encounter problems for hosts on networks that have a
rogue IPv6 router (such as Windows Internet Connection Sharing).  Over
the last few weeks we have been implementing systems to scan for rogue
IPv6 routers so that we can identify and address them.  From initial
results, we don't expect to see a disruption of service.  It is possible
that our scanning has missed a rogue IPv6 router, however, and if you
are experiencing trouble connecting to www.google.com you should contact
our Network Operations Center at 207-561-3587.

If you are concerned about this change and would like to test your
connectivity before April 14th you can attempt to access
www.noc.maine.edu in a web browser.  This website has both IP and IPv6
address records associated with it, the same way that www.google.com
will.  If you are unable to access the site, or it is markedly slower,
then you may have a rogue IPv6 router on your network and should contact
us to locate it.

The University of Maine System has historically enabled IPv6 when
requested (a very small number of networks to date).  We will not be
enabling IPv6 service on any new networks until the end of the spring
academic semester.  The reason for this delay on changes is to allow us
to focus our efforts on monitoring the quality of service to Google over
IPv6 and measure end-user experience on our current IPv6-enabled
networks.

Ray Soucy
Communications Specialist

+1 (207) 561-3526

Communications and Network Services

University of Maine System
http://www.maine.edu/