Slashdot Mirror

Still frustrated that the ISPs in Canada are still lagging on getting IPv6. The biggest failing ISP is Bell, with no publicly announced plans.

There has been the "Call Your ISP for IPv6" campaign by the guys over at Sixxs:

https://www.sixxs.net/wiki/Cal...

And that is the whole fun point of it all: AICCU (or anything else) cannot fix network problems time issues or wrongly entered passwords automagically either....

Hence why it logs a message to what the problem is and EXITS. Note: it does not *crash* as what everybody seems to call a proper exit(code) call.

Restarting AICCU thus does not resolve anything unless the administrator of the host intervenes by fixing the relevant problem.

As for "Fedora fixing it", checking: http://pkgs.fedoraproject.org/... there is no "fix" there, they just added the requested "wait for ntp sync" flag to systemd which only solves one small part of the problem (no valid time yet, at which point one cannot do crypto, thus why are you connecting to online services at all?).

Without functional network connectivity it still won't start though, and that makes sense as there is nothing to connect to and thus it cannot do anything, hence it properly logs a message (that clearly nobody reads, because why would one read log messages) and then exits.

Note that systemd/Redhat folks are not the only ones who do not seem to understand the real problem here and think they can magically "fix" things while the host itself is not the problem (eg no network connectivity, broken connectivity, broken time setting, broken timezone setting, wrong password etc etc etc).

See also:
  https://www.sixxs.net/news/201...

The /13 was returned. The largest allocated prefix is currently /19: http://www.sixxs.net/tools/grh/dfp/

There are already ISPs which supply IPv6. The SixXS FAQ lists [...] 14 in the USA.

The two major ISPs in Fort Wayne, Indiana, are Comcast and Frontier. I tried to read the SixXS FAQ to see if either of these was among these 14, but all I got was this:

This Connection is Untrusted

You have asked Firefox to connect securely to www.sixxs.net, but we can't confirm that your connection is secure.

Normally, when you try to connect securely, sites will present trusted identification to prove that you are going to the right place. However, this site's identity can't be verified.

What Should I Do?

If you usually connect to this site without problems, this error could mean that someone is trying to impersonate the site, and you shouldn't continue.

Technical Details

www.sixxs.net uses an invalid security certificate.

The certificate is not trusted because no issuer chain was provided.

(Error code: sec_error_unknown_issuer)

Check out sixxs.net for a decent tunnel broker. They're also a good starting point to find ISPs who can provide native IPv6 routing (those same ISPs would also be likely to be have the infrastructure in place to provide the standard services you require).

If you're UK based, Goscomb are v6 native, provide static addressing (free & by default) & FTTC, don't perform any traffic shaping & offer 30-day rolling contracts.
Their caps are a little low for me, but it's a good service & I get what I pay for.

I'm mostly wondering what to do about my iptables in linux.

The good news is that ipv6 has been available on linux for I donno a decade or so, and ipv6 tunnels have been available, etc. The ipv6 land rush is very much like people in 1997 talking about that "brand new" internet thing, and just like the great ipv4 rollout its a good thing there's a decade or so of sound traffic engineering experience out there already for ipv6.

1) I guess it depends a lot on your distro.
2) Some terms to google for beyond the obvious are "ip6tables".
3) nobody needs NAT on ipv6 which inherently provided stateful firewalling on ipv4. TCP is pretty easy, SYN packets only allowed in one interface...
4) Personally I find it easiest to make two firewall scripts a ipv4 and a ipv6. If for no other reason than totally screwing up ipv6 will not mess up your ipv4 access and vice versa making it simpler to recover from mistakes.
5) Good luck wrapping your head around the concept of "every host is a multihomed host" aka "link-local addresses". Please don't attempt to route LL out on the greater internet, mkay, they're for mdns / bonjour type stuff.
6) Good luck with dynamic addresses and revdns. If you never used BIND's ORIGIN lines well you best learn how, and quickly.
7) Please block all RH0 aka rt-type 0 packets they're the ipv6 evil bit
8) Go to Hurricane Electric (they rock in general, BTW) and become a sage ipv6 dude. I found this quite easy when they initially rolled this out several years ago, maybe its harder now. You need to do this "course" to learn the ropes and glossary before you can learn to firewall or you'll turn all sorcerers apprentice.

http://ipv6.he.net/certification/

9) Once you know ipv6 you could do worse than to start at

http://www.sixxs.net/wiki/IPv6_Firewalling

SIXXS is kind of like a major cell phone company, in that everyone's opinion of them seems exclusively driven by their local sixxs pop or their local cellphone tower quality. So you'll get meaningless comments all over the map about how they rock or suck based on the little neighborhood the commenter lives in. That said if you live in range of the Chicago pop, it rocks, although it had some exciting momentary outages a couple years ago. I use them on a dynamic endpoint and HE's tunnelbroker on a static endpoint and I'm very happy with both... your mileage may vary...

Maybe you should try this on your desktop machine instead:

http://www.sixxs.net/pops/

It should by pass a NAT router just fine.

Anything you can put *WRT or similar on can do it (as others have mentioned in this post). Or if you want to run a software firewall on some spare hardware, pfSense (2.1 beta), m0n0wall, and some others support IPv6 also.

I have seen some ZyXel routers that had IPv6 support in their GUI, which gives me hope. Though I don't recall the specific model. Wikipedia> and Sixxs have lists of routers that do support IPv6 out of the box.

In Europe, Asia and Africa ISPs are already making the slow move to IPv6. In North America it is only a handful of ISPs that have publicized their efforts (two come to mind: Comcast and TechSavvy), whereas others are putting short term profits before long term success.

In the short term companies that already have massive private networks can install a web proxy to deal with external IPv6 HTTP hosts. Long term they will need to revaluate the design of the network and what really needs to have access to the external IPv6 network and what can stay oblivious. In general anything that is only going to communicate with the internal network can stay IPv4 centric, while other devices with be dual IPv4/IPv6 stack.

The one challenge people with wanting to make the web server accessible from IPv6 clients are hosting centres that don't provide IPv6 yet. It is certainly possible to get around this by using a tunnel, but this is really far from optimal.

BTW Some hosting services that are IPv6 ready are listed here:

http://www.sixxs.net/wiki/IPv6_Enabled_Hosting

How about switching to the new technology? Some sites have already native IPv6 support, and for others you can use public IPv6->IPv4 proxies. See for instance: http://www.sixxs.net/tools/gateway/

How many isps or carriers now are giving ipv6 as an option?

List

Not everything is down. The IP block of the The Ministory of Communication is still up.

SixXS
Hurricane Electric
And others.

There is a list here of IPv6 capable routers:

http://www.sixxs.net/wiki/Routers

The list is by no means complete, so if you are aware of others then be sure to add it the list (you will need to register for a Sixxs account).

BTW At this point, if your ISP does not provide IPv6 support then you can try out 6to4 or Teredo. Myself I am currently using 6to4, since this is support by the Apple Airport Extreme, and all the devices on my network have an IPv6 address this way.

If you're running a modern OS, it's fairly easy to set up a tunnel.

Register on either http://tunnelbroker.net/ or http://www.sixxs.net/main/ and create a new tunnel for yourself. There are instructions on how to start the tunnel which will put that single machine on the IPv6 network.

From there, you can look into setting up RAdvD (if *nix) to act as an endpoint on your network, supplying IPv6 IPs to everything on it automatically.

The next step would be to have an ISP which supplies an IPv6 address to your router (which would need to support it, most cheap ones don't currently), which removes the need for a tunnel and RAdvD, but this step is going to be some time coming..

Maybe this can help?

Aside: Woah, I pasted something and it worked!

Tunnel brokers. I like SixXS since they gave me a free tunnel and a free subnet for all my home PCs (an entire /48, I think I should be set for a while). Works like a charm. Also check out Hurricane Electric.

Use a tunnel broker service. There are at least 2 free tunnel brokers, SixXs and Hurricane Electric

No, the implication is that dual stack fails as a general Internet solution if providers start to give their users IPv6-only... at a point in time long before all IPv4 users and services have dual stack. The fact is, at the moment IPv6-only users can access only a small percentage of what the Internet has to offer. If you're an AT&T user, there's no real reason to complain about your wretched ISP not having any immediate plans to give you native IPv6, because you can always go out and get yourself a /48 from a tunnel broker, such as Hurricane Electric, or SixXS. However, I've not yet seen the reverse: tunnel brokers that are willing to offer their customers one or more public IPv4 addresses via an IPv6 tunnel. At the rate things are going, though, I'll bet there will be a market for this sooner as opposed to later.

Newegg doesn't sell them, but the Apple Airport Express (and any 802.11n based Apple router) supports IPv6. $99 and up. Buffalo had one out in 2007, before their WiFi lawsuit, and has a few more out now. DLink does too.

http://www.sixxs.net/wiki/Routers has a good list.

It will be interesting to see what router manufacturers decide to be nice and offer IPv6 formware upgrades, and which ones push people towards new equipment.

I upgraded my systems to ipv6 even though I just have IPv4 by signing up for a free tunnel broker service. I recommend SixXS if you are serious, or one of the others if you just want to flirt around with IPv6. Basically, you open a tunnel on one of the machines, it starts radvd which activates ipv6 on every machine on your LAN automagically, and thats all you do. Perhaps edit a config file here or there to turn on ipv6 if its lacking for some reason. The radvd machine broadcasts on your net and provides something like DHCP for all your ipv6 enabled machines which usually just pick it up on the fly with no reboot or anything required.

Many pages have special ip6 domain names, such ipv6.google.com or www.v6.facebook.com. Almost none have IPv6 on their main domain name, they all still experiment with it, but hesitate to actually deploy it.

And about routers, this list is rather short and certainly doesn't qualify as "many". The really shocking part isn't even that hardly anybody has a IPv6 capable router at home, but that even routers you buy today for most part still completly lack any IPv6 capabilities.

So I navigate around IPV6 sites. What is there different to see or do? Not much. Some IPV6 brownie points, carrots, or something is needed. Sixxs installed rather easily on Ubuntu, just had to issue a command line. The magical-gui installer almost did it though.

Having IPv6 on your LAN doesn't mean you lose IPv4 connectivity. Both protocols can and do co-exist on your network. Hosts on my networks that are dual stacked IPv4/IPv6 include Windows XP, Windows 2000 (there was a developer pack a while back), Linux and MacOS X.

Originally when I first started playing with IPv6 on my network I took one of my MacOS X machines, got a subnet from Sixxs (tunnel broker) and installed Aiccu (their client software). With a little extra configuration to setup the machine to do router advertisements and make it act as router everything was up and running. All the machines that had IPv6 activated got themselves a routable IPv6 address and were able to connect to IPv6 web sites.

Later on I decided to buy myself an Apple Airport, which has IPv6 support and then simply enabled 6to4. Ideally I would have connected to Sixxs again, but there is a firmware issue when using PPPoE, that they have failed to fix thus far (if they want better advertising then they should have a longer firmware maintenance window).

Because of the limitation of the Apple Airport, I have been keeping my eyes open for alternative solutions. For me any viable solution needs to provide a GUI for configuration. OpenWRT and DD-WRT both have IPv6 support, but not from the UI last time I looked. The one that seems the most interesting is Tomato, which has a UI and is the one that a Canadian ISP known as Teksavvy is playing with (see here). Buffalo seems to have IPv6 in its firmware, but it is not a feature that is marketed, so I will need to try one out before going for it.

It should be noted that much of my knowledge on IPv6 has been garnered by spending time on the Sixxs.net forums and wiki.

For the most part once you have IPv6 installed on your network most people shouldn't notice. One thing to make sure is the router has a properly configured IPv6 firewall.

Having IPv6 on your LAN doesn't mean you lose IPv4 connectivity. Both protocols can and do co-exist on your network. Hosts on my networks that are dual stacked IPv4/IPv6 include Windows XP, Windows 2000 (there was a developer pack a while back), Linux and MacOS X.

Originally when I first started playing with IPv6 on my network I took one of my MacOS X machines, got a subnet from Sixxs (tunnel broker) and installed Aiccu (their client software). With a little extra configuration to setup the machine to do router advertisements and make it act as router everything was up and running. All the machines that had IPv6 activated got themselves a routable IPv6 address and were able to connect to IPv6 web sites.

Later on I decided to buy myself an Apple Airport, which has IPv6 support and then simply enabled 6to4. Ideally I would have connected to Sixxs again, but there is a firmware issue when using PPPoE, that they have failed to fix thus far (if they want better advertising then they should have a longer firmware maintenance window).

Because of the limitation of the Apple Airport, I have been keeping my eyes open for alternative solutions. For me any viable solution needs to provide a GUI for configuration. OpenWRT and DD-WRT both have IPv6 support, but not from the UI last time I looked. The one that seems the most interesting is Tomato, which has a UI and is the one that a Canadian ISP known as Teksavvy is playing with (see here). Buffalo seems to have IPv6 in its firmware, but it is not a feature that is marketed, so I will need to try one out before going for it.

It should be noted that much of my knowledge on IPv6 has been garnered by spending time on the Sixxs.net forums and wiki.

For the most part once you have IPv6 installed on your network most people shouldn't notice. One thing to make sure is the router has a properly configured IPv6 firewall.

http://www.sixxs.net/ or https://www.sixxs.net/
Beware their ssl cert is from an unlisted provider so maybe just stick with the http version

http://www.sixxs.net/ or https://www.sixxs.net/
Beware their ssl cert is from an unlisted provider so maybe just stick with the http version

I tried to upgrade a major porn site to ipv6 years ago. Our provider didn't support it. I couldn't get an ipv6 gateway to talk to me about gating it. We just couldn't get it done, and it wasn't because our efforts weren't there.

    It looks like there are still only a handful of ipv6 sites out there.

    http://www.ipv6.org/v6-www.html

    http://www.sixxs.net/wiki/IPv6_Enabled_Websites

    Until there is a good reason to upgrade, it won't happen. Leave the sky is falling conspiracy out of it.

Good lord, you've *got* to be kidding. Google has done more to push v6 than virtually any other content provider out there.

What has Google done to push IPv6, i.e. in what way has it demonstrated feature parity with IPv4 or benefits over IPv4? The fact that Google is considered at the forefront is a sign of how little /anyone/ has done in the public space - and it hasn't done more than any number of content providers, smaller ISPs (that's the way to do it!), etc which already are involved in IPv6.

But, to answer your question, why not start with the sixxs coolstuff? Note in particular that multicast is demonstrated, and that promotional IPv6 services are offered (newsgroups) even when the service could be provided as easily with IPv4. It's a very minor marketing effort, but it's still got substance to it much greater in proportion to size than Google has (hitherto) demonstrated.

What is this "choice" you're referring to? Because last I checked, users would have a choice: run dual-stack or don't.

The choice to use IPv4 or IPv6 (with extra features, where IPv6 can be so exploited) sites.

So now you're saying that, to fix this problem, we should expect those consumers to go upgrade their routers? It's just not gonna happen (outside the normal obsolescence cycle).

And how exactly are ISPs going to get Approved[tm] by Google if most of their customers have broken routers which ruin the fun once AAAA records are sent?

while simultaneously transparently enabling v6 for those users who have an ISP that's on the ball

But this will just mean a decrease in performance until *end-to-end* routing/bandwidth for IPv6 is as good as for IPv4. You might not get the n second timeout - the nature of the lameness just changes. An ISP doesn't either have good or bad IPv6 connectivity to the whole world!

unless content providers start populating the v6 web, it'll continue to go nowhere fast,

Unless they start populating it with something users want. Even if it's just feature parity combined with the vanity stage I mentioned a few posts up, where you're visiting either www.blah.com or www.legacy-ipv4.blah.com. But making it up to Google rather than the customers whether services in general are good enough or better on IPv6 is daft.

The problem of ISPs distributing broken routers which manage to advertise a prefix which they aren't ever issued with? Perhaps you aren't sure yourself, since you haven't been able to name one router which exhibits the problem, but you're not making it clear what actually goes wrong and why the solution isn't to fix the problem (of distributing broken routers) rather than one huge bureaucratic bandaid.

Because the whitelist is feasible? The alternative is to break connectivity for (according to these folks) .8% of users while those broken routers are fixed/replaced.

Besides which, without v6 content, there is no reason to fix broken hardware. And if the broke hardware isn't fixed, content providers won't roll out v6. It's the same chicken-and-egg problem v6 has been stalled over for years. The difference is, this whitelist solution actually has a chance of fixing it.

If you regard negotiating with every ISP as "voila... problem solved", you are more engineer than the real world will allow for.

If the guys running the whitelist are willing to go through that effort, who cares? Does it solve the problem? Yes. Is it complicated? Certainly. But at least it has a chance of succeeding.

I've already heard many people whine about IPv6 slowing down their machine. It's usually to do with a small amount of time wasted by failing at looking up an AAAA record before moving onto the A record, and nothing to do with finding an AAAA record and trying to access it. The AAAA lookup, as far as I can recally, happens when the system supports IPv6 rather than only when the system has a routable IPv6 address, which is daft.

Yeah, agreed, that's definitely an issue. In fact, glibc used to do that for a long time (fortunately that issue is fixed... I believe now it only attempts AAAA resolution if the host has a routable v6 address).

And I certainly agree with you that there are likely *many* reasons why advertising AAAA records has caused headaches for end hosts, not the least of which is broken v6 stacks (as previously alluded to). But broken routing is, at least as far as I can tell, a well known issue with v6, and I really can't blame the content providers for attempting to search for a solution to this issue.

I suggested that the ISPs aren't being honest about why they want the whitelist.

So what do you think the real reason is? Either it's to fix v6 connectivity issues, or there's some other reason. Why do you propose that reason is?

If I'm Joe provider, I can return AAAA records if you're using my DNS server via IPv6, or A records if you're using it via IPv4. And, if I'm an ISP, I'll send the customer appropriate A-sending or AAAA-sending server addresses depending on how you're connecting, without you having to worry. Why will this not happen, unless you don't want it to? I need more information.

Probably because there's *still* some OSes that don't support DNS resolution over IPv6? Heck, even glibc is known to have issues with this configuration.

I don't think Google or NetFlix are stupid - I think they're top performing businesses. Why would I therefore assume that their solution to a problem is the best solution for anyone but Google or NetFlix?

Well, if you have a better idea, let's hear it.

Comcast is doing an IPv6 trial right now. Freenet in France has had IPv6 running using 6RD for quite a long time now. You can get IPv6 tunnels from Hurricane Internet and Sixxs. If you are interested in IPv6, go start using it. Don't just sit there on your (no doubt svelte) ass! :')

It will mean that the router companies suddenly have to pull their collective fingers out, but in the meantime there are forward thinking manufacturers:

http://www.sixxs.net/wiki/Routers

I use SIXXS, it's been working great.

http://www.sixxs.net/main/ (www is required, the site isn't perfect but it works)

I currently have two tunnels (one to an out of house server & one to my house), a subnet for my house (I've tested it, I can ssh from an external server directly to my in-house computers without any port forwarding). It adds a little latency (since you have to go through some other router before reaching the ipv6 part of the internet), but not too bad.

Some users insist that there's no way for consumers to get affordable native IPv6 at home. Consider this: http://www.sixxs.net/faq/connectivity/?faq=native
You can get native IPv6 DSL almost anywhere in Germany. I'm going to switch soon as well. Also more and more data centers provide native IPv6 at no additional cost as well because they're actually running out of IPv4 addresses already.

The transition nodes on the edges of the IPv6-only zone are dual-stack, yes. The hosts inside the IPv6-only zone are not dual stack, nor are the IPv4 servers they connect to.

So you can have 20,000,000 IPv6-only nodes, connecting to a legacy IPv4-only node, via a single IPv4 tunnel broker at the edge of the IPv6-only network.

Just like all the machines on my home network believe they are on an IPv6 network, because the gateway router invisibly handles all the IPv6 over IPv4 tunneling to get them connected via my ISP.

I can go to http://ipv6gate.sixxs.net/ right now. It tells me I'm connecting via IPv6, and lets me connect to various IPv4-only web sites via IPv6. That shows the principle. The rest is just setting up your edge-of-IPv6-net routers to handle it.

Could somebody please tell me whatever happened to the ipv6experiment.com ?

No idea, but there are a number of early IPv6 related web sites that no longer exist, simply because they don't need to any more. Some of these sites were set up as experiments, but as IPv6 is slowly creeping in the mainstream they achieved what they set out to do and passed on. For a starting point on IPv6 related sites (not complete), then start here:

http://www.sixxs.net/wiki/Category:IPv6-specific_content

Instead at the current situation you have to figure out how and were to get an IPv6 address, and either keep an IPv4 as well (and switch between the two as the situation demands) or work out how you are going to talk to the 90+% of the world that doesn't have an IPv6 address. Either of those require extra work, for every person trying to connect to the network.

The issue of where to get an IPv6 address is false one, unless you have an ISP who is dragging their feet. It is a short-term problem and once the infrastructure is in place the apparent issues will go away. Sure it is not IPv4, but no one said it was. There are plenty of solutions to give your computers names, so there should be fewer and fewer cases where you will need to access you machines using numbers.

For example of an ISP who is not dragging their feet, in France there is an ISP called free.fr that provides IPv6 to their customers at no extra cost. Once enabled the router (users are given modem-router hybrids) advertises the IPv6 subnet prefix to all the computers in the subnet. If the computers are IPv6 aware then they will self configure the address ( subnet prefix + MAC address ) and start routing all IPv6 addresses through the announced router.

If you have an ISP who is dragging their feet and you are behind a NAT, then you need to establish a tunnel to an IPv6 Tunnel broker. There are a number of places to do this, including but not limited to: Sixxs.net, Freenet6 and Hurricane Electric.

The only thing I would like to see now are more home router manufacturers providing IPv6 gateway/routers. Apple's Airport and the Fritz!Box are two of the few that do.

If you have your doubts about IPv6, then at least give yourself two months with it and then come back and tell me whether you are still of the same opinion.

http://www.sixxs.net/misc/coolstuff/#newsservers

Public:

    news.ipv6.eweka.nl
    newszilla6.xs4all.nl

Requires signup:

    reader.ipv6.xsnews.nl

-molo

http://www.sixxs.net/misc/coolstuff/#newsservers

I've never found a free one that was worth a damn

Enable IPv6 and use these free ones:
http://www.sixxs.net/misc/coolstuff/#newsservers

You have to remember who owns Speakeasy now(BestBuy).
Sucks for me too because I'm a Speakeasy customer myself.
I did ask about it a few months ago and they didn't have any idea or
plans for IPv6 that they could tell me anyway(probably going to switch to Verizon's FiOS partly because of this).

Here's a list of IPv6 providers http://www.sixxs.net/wiki/IPv6_Enabled_Service_Providers/
Some of them are in the USA(8 I think) but, only a few offer IPv6 to end customers.

But the IPv6 overlords in their infinite wisdom have decided that we can't just use a 192.168.0.* equivalent, oh no. All addresses must be publicly routeable.

Others mention private alternatives; I'll summarize them here:

Site-local addressing fec0::/10 , deprecated . This is deprecated, but I don't expect these addresses to be reused for other purposes in...ever, I guess. Just pick a network address beginning with fec0: through feff: and have fun.

Unique local addressing fc00::/7 . For various reasons described elsewhere IETF would prefer all addresses be unique even if they aren't globally routable. Pick your own /48 between fc00:0:0: through fcff:ffff:ffff: and have fun. Or you can go to SixXS and have one non-authoritatively registered to you.

6to4 2002::/8 . If you have a public static IPv4 address then you automatically have a /48 starting with 2002: and then your hex-encoded IPv4 address. If not, then there should be no harm in using a private IPv4 address to make your 6to4 /48. For example, if your NAT router is 192.168.1.1 then your 6to4 subnet could be anything from 2002:c0a8:0101:0::/64 through 2002:c0a8:0101:ffff::/64 . (If you want to be sure no private packets escape to the real internet then null route 2002:/8 or 2002:c0a8:/16 at your IPv6 router if you have one.)

Which is fine - after all, there should be plenty of addresses, right? So why is there nowhere that will give me, as a private individual, an IPv6 address (officially, I mean - I'm aware of that website that generates an address that should be ok to use)?

See the SixXS link above. There is no official ULA registry, but they're the only ones I know of that are trying so far. The ULA addresses are not publicly routable, so a collision is not really a problem unless your network needs to someday merge with a colliding network. I could see that happening with major corporations, but it's not likely a problem with the typical home LAN.

Helpful tinkerer hint: Whenever you get an IPv6 range you generally get a /48, but as you assign IPv6 networks and routes to your network you will want to use /64 subnets. You don't have to, but things generally tend to make more sense that way, and default settings tend to assume that setup.

Now if you want to be on the live global IPv6 network then you can go to a tunnel broker and request a tunnel and/or subnet, and then you get a live address range. I'm in North America and use the free SixXS.

But the IPv6 overlords in their infinite wisdom have decided that we can't just use a 192.168.0.* equivalent, oh no. All addresses must be publicly routeable.

Others mention private alternatives; I'll summarize them here:

Site-local addressing fec0::/10 , deprecated . This is deprecated, but I don't expect these addresses to be reused for other purposes in...ever, I guess. Just pick a network address beginning with fec0: through feff: and have fun.

Unique local addressing fc00::/7 . For various reasons described elsewhere IETF would prefer all addresses be unique even if they aren't globally routable. Pick your own /48 between fc00:0:0: through fcff:ffff:ffff: and have fun. Or you can go to SixXS and have one non-authoritatively registered to you.

6to4 2002::/8 . If you have a public static IPv4 address then you automatically have a /48 starting with 2002: and then your hex-encoded IPv4 address. If not, then there should be no harm in using a private IPv4 address to make your 6to4 /48. For example, if your NAT router is 192.168.1.1 then your 6to4 subnet could be anything from 2002:c0a8:0101:0::/64 through 2002:c0a8:0101:ffff::/64 . (If you want to be sure no private packets escape to the real internet then null route 2002:/8 or 2002:c0a8:/16 at your IPv6 router if you have one.)

Which is fine - after all, there should be plenty of addresses, right? So why is there nowhere that will give me, as a private individual, an IPv6 address (officially, I mean - I'm aware of that website that generates an address that should be ok to use)?

See the SixXS link above. There is no official ULA registry, but they're the only ones I know of that are trying so far. The ULA addresses are not publicly routable, so a collision is not really a problem unless your network needs to someday merge with a colliding network. I could see that happening with major corporations, but it's not likely a problem with the typical home LAN.

Helpful tinkerer hint: Whenever you get an IPv6 range you generally get a /48, but as you assign IPv6 networks and routes to your network you will want to use /64 subnets. You don't have to, but things generally tend to make more sense that way, and default settings tend to assume that setup.

Now if you want to be on the live global IPv6 network then you can go to a tunnel broker and request a tunnel and/or subnet, and then you get a live address range. I'm in North America and use the free SixXS.

I'd mod you informative, but I'd rather reply.

I'm with Be as well and I found out thanks to this article that they are one of the ones filtering / censoring. They will lose me as a customer as well. It's a damn shame as they are pretty good otherwise.

I'll be looking for an ISP that has both IPv6 support and doesn't filter. I have a feeling my money will be going to a small ISP, and I'm happy with that. SixXS has a page with 5 ISPs that support IPv6, and I'm going to find out if they offer connectivity in my area.

Please post again here if you find a decent alternative.

I'm using IPv6 just fine for several years now. Oh, and NetBSD had IPv6 since 1999 or so.

Just get involved, everyone can get IPv6 right now: http://www.sixxs.net/

https://www.sixxs.net/faq/connectivity/?faq=native

ISP IPv6 listing.

Now that I know Linux joins the ranks of IPv6 compliant OSs, I just need an ISP that supports IPv6. The problem is, in North America at least, is that there are still few to no ISPs providing IPv6 addresses. Instead I have to resort to tunnel providers (some listed here). What we need is a list of major internet service providers in North America and an indication of their IPv6 readiness and what they excuse is for not starting the migration.

In order to get ISPs moving we could each mail the one we use and ask them when the plan to offer IPv6 addresses.

Some 'cool stuff' using IPv6: https://www.sixxs.net/misc/coolstuff/

The numbers to add, so to NOT confuse the people who now shout that Africa is going so great:

See SixXS Ghost Route Hunter for the live data:

* 6bone (144) (phased out on 6/6/2006)
* RIPE (1119)
* APNIC (490)
* ARIN (706)
* LACNIC (115)
* AfriNIC (60)

There are thus ONLY 60 IPv6 allocations in the African region, if you then follow the link, you will find the following nice thing: "Thus 19 (33.33%) networks are currently correctly announced."
As there barely is no Internet in Africa, (especially when looking at ASNs, and remember that a lot of US ASN's are used in Africa) yes you might reach 22%.

Wow, yes that is a lot compared to the rest of the world:
AFRINIC - 19 (33.33%)
LACNIC - 37 (32.17%)
APNIC - 223 (45.70%)
ARIN - 239 (34.00%)
RIPE - 548 (49.02%)

Europe wins again! :)

Statistics again show how easily things can be misunderstood and interpreted in various ways.

I've been using IPv6 since about 2001, but after the BT Exact Tunnel Broker stopped, I was lost as to where I could get access from. I signed up with Sixxs, but they have rather tight (anal, some would say) policies. They'll give you access, etc, but a single bounced/rejected email, and they disable your account. http://www.sixxs.net/faq/account/?faq=bounces.
Then I gave Hurricane Electric's Tunnel Broker a try. What a breath of fresh air. It takes about 2 mins from sign-up to being connected - they give you the relevant commands to run too, if you're not familiar with it. If you've got 2 mins to try it out, give them a go.

And Slashdot - how can you be one of the top tech sites, and not be accessible over Ipv6? And throw in SSL too, while you're joining the 21st century.

First find out all the ISPs in your area and ask them about IPv6 support. Second to get on board while waiting for them to get their act together (assuming they haven't already done so), choose a transition solution. Some include:
    - Freenet6 - http://go6.net/4105/freenet.asp
    - Aiccu - https://www.sixxs.net/wiki/Aiccu
    - Teredo
    - Hurricane Electric - http://tunnelbroker.net/