So in my last blog post I asked, are you ready for IPv6? The post came about when I was looking at Schools MIS data, which Graham, Joshua and myself have being look at to see who are the big movers and shakers in the Schools administration software (MIS) arena. Data is collected by what software suppliers a school uses to submit the School Census (in England) which is requested under the Freedom of Information (FOI) from Department of Education(DfE) (saving having to FOI every individual school). In order to enhance this data I was joining the data onto the general schools data that can be extract from EduBase. Looking at the data I notice that the website addresses listed in the extract was of extremely poor quality. A number even had email addresses listed!

This got me thinking, are schools ready for IPv6? If Sky are running out of IPv4 addresses and offer IPv6 only connections at a lower price, how many parents are going to jump on the deal only to find out they can’t access their child’s school website later on. After a bit of scripting and a support call to Mythic-Beasts to enable a response in JSON that I could automate, I had the results. It wasn’t good.

Still, no-ones ready for IPv6 are they, sure they’ll be ready in time. Won’t they?

We can only judge the future from what we have suffered in the past

  • šDomain registration correctness
  • šContent management systems
  • šDocument type definition
  • šRaw HTML homepage size
  • šGoogle Analytics
  • šIPv6 readiness

At the moment I’m still creating the presentation detailing my findings, but you can download the raw data from: https://github.com/matt40k/SchoolsWebsites-England