Given that the IPv6 mandate for US federal government agencies came from the Obama administration, a few people noted in recent days that the White House website was not available over IPv6 and indeed it was not listed in yesterday’s run of NIST’s list of US government IPv6-enabled sites.
This morning, though, brings the news that www.whitehouse.gov is now accessible over IPv6. A quick “dig aaaa www.whitehouse.gov” shows these results:
;; ANSWER SECTION: www.whitehouse.gov. 2441 IN CNAME www.whitehouse.gov.edgesuite.net. www.whitehouse.gov.edgesuite.net. 216 IN CNAME www.eop-edge-lb.akadns.net. www.eop-edge-lb.akadns.net. 61 IN CNAME a1128.dsch.akamai.net. a1128.dsch.akamai.net. 7 IN AAAA 2600:1400:a::1743:fa93 a1128.dsch.akamai.net. 7 IN AAAA 2600:1400:a::1743:fa78
… which indicate that the site is apparently one of the ones that we mentioned yesterday that Akamai would be enabling via IPv6.
A visit to the White House site using the very cool IPvFoo extension for Google Chrome also shows this graphically:
I would note that the image shows the standard challenge of modern websites that they are comprised of many different components that load dynamically, some of which are available over IPv6 and some still only over IPv4. The key point, though, is that www.whitehouse.gov is accessible over IPv6.
Kudos to the White House team and Akamai for making the site available over IPv6. We look forward to seeing how many more US government sites come online throughout today and over the weekend.
Can we help you get started with IPv6?
P.S. If you like the idea of this IPvFoo extension but are a Firefox user, there is a similar add-on called IPvFox.