Current News

This page contains news items related to SixXS happenings and operations. This will also be the place where public announcements will be made available.

There are currently known problems with : usewr01 uslax01. We are aware of this and one does not need to contact us nor report anything about this. The problems will be resolved in due time, please have patience. A separate PoP status page displays the status of the various PoPs. One can consult the Tickets for other outstanding issues.

Monday, March 8th - Covered in snow: a second PoP in Zurich courtesy of Init7

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.

Sunday, February 28th - Brazilian PoP brudi01 launches, SixXS goes South America

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

Sunday, February 14th - New E-Mail/Bounce policy

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!

Tuesday, January 26th - New CACert SSL Certificate

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

Wednesday, January 20th - Cleanup in progress

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!

Tuesday, January 19th - SixXS @ NANOG 48

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.

Thursday, January 7th - Netcologne PoP opens to provide IPv6 connectivity to their customers

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.