6bone

~ the eulogy ~

the 6bone was a second internet built to practice on the first one. its addresses all started with 3ffe, a block set aside to mean this is not real yet, do not route it for keeps. you reached it only if somebody had already dug you a tunnel through the ordinary internet to one of its nodes. no tunnel ever ran to a dial-up line in a flat in Ankara, so i only ever read about it.

i know the shape of it as an engineer, not as someone who was ever on it. when i came online the internet i got was IPv4 and only IPv4, a modem handing me one address the whole world already agreed was real. the 6bone was the opposite of that, a network of addresses everyone agreed were fake, kept fake on purpose so people could break things on it without breaking anything that mattered.

so this is a grave i write from the manuals, not from memory. still, it is one of the more quietly important dead things on this list, because the internet you are reading this on is partly the thing the 6bone was built to rehearse.

~ the dossier ~

~ what it was for ~

the internet was running out of its old addresses almost as soon as it got big, and IPv6 was the replacement, a numbering plan large enough to never worry again. but you cannot test a new address system for the whole planet on the live one. so in March 1996, out of an IETF meeting in Los Angeles, a group of volunteers started building a place to try it. Bob Fink at a US national lab kept the map. machines around the world dug IPv6-inside-IPv4 tunnels to one another until a parallel network existed, and at its height around 2003 it linked more than a thousand sites across fifty-odd countries, all of them speaking the not-yet-real 3ffe addresses to each other.

~ the postmortem ~

the sandbox worked so well it made itself pointless. once the regional registries started handing out real IPv6 blocks, the ones beginning 2001 that would actually route on the open internet, there was no reason to keep practicing on fake ones. a short document, RFC 3701, set the terms. no new 3ffe addresses after the start of 2004, and the whole thing off by the 6th of June 2006. they picked that date on purpose. 06/06/06, all sixes, a small joke for a protocol named after the number six. the prefix went back to IANA and operators were told to filter it out. a network that had held together for a decade ended on a scheduled afternoon.

~ the inheritance ~

you cannot see the 6bone anymore and you never really could, but you are standing on what it proved. every phone that pulls an IPv6 address off a mobile network, every home connection that quietly runs the new protocol under the old one, is running a system that took its early falls on that testbed. the practice net absorbed the failures so the real net would not have to. that is the whole job of a rehearsal, and then you strike the set.

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