May 20, 2002 was just another day at the office. I suppose you could say it was like any other day in that I woke up early and drank too much coffee, but there’s something about this date that sticks out for me now—because we were finally shipping IPv6 on our web servers.

It wasn’t a glamorous project by any stretch of the imagination. In fact, it felt like more of an afterthought at first. Back then, IPv4 was still ruling the roost, and everyone was talking about Y2K being over, not about running out of IP addresses. But as we approached 2001 and the new millennium, the conversation began to shift.

IPv6 was starting to get some real buzz in tech circles. Sun Microsystems was pushing hard with their JavaOS effort, promising a future where IPv6 would be the norm. VMware was quietly working on their virtualization technology, which seemed like a distant dream at the time but was about to change everything. And of course, there were whispers about Napster and early peer-to-peer networks taking the world by storm.

But our project? Well, it was just an IT task to support what we saw as a long-term infrastructure need. My team had spent months arguing over whether we should even bother with IPv6 at all. Some argued that 32-bit addresses would never run out—after all, there were trillions of them! Others insisted that we were way ahead of our time and might just end up shipping a product nobody could use.

In the end, we decided to go for it. We set up test servers with IPv6 and started learning as much as we could about this new protocol. It was a mess. The tools were still primitive compared to what we have now—no real documentation, no robust tooling, just a lot of trial and error.

We had to debug everything from our firewall configurations to our DNS records. Sendmail didn’t support IPv6 by default! Apache had its quirks too. We spent hours setting up dual-stack environments so that both IPv4 and IPv6 clients could access the same service without any issues. And then there were the name resolution problems—BIND just couldn’t seem to handle IPv6 nameservers properly.

But we persisted. We argued, we debugged, and most importantly, we shipped. By May 2002, our web servers were serving content over both IPv4 and IPv6 simultaneously. It wasn’t a perfect solution by any means, but it was a step in the right direction.

Looking back now, I realize that what seemed like an unimportant task at the time turned out to be one of those moments when you’re making history, even if you don’t fully grasp it yet. IPv6 became more than just another protocol; it was a reminder that sometimes, we need to embrace change and future-proof our infrastructure before it’s too late.

In the years since, I’ve often thought about that moment—about all the late nights spent configuring servers and troubleshooting obscure issues. And while I might not have been at the forefront of IPv6 adoption in tech circles (in 2002 or even today), I take pride in knowing that we did our part to push the internet forward, one server at a time.

So here’s to you, IPv6—may your path be rocky but your impact undeniable. And for those still doubting its worth? Well, just remember: we shipped it anyway.