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IPv6 Friendly ISPs?
ps asks: "In light of our recent discussions, does anyone know of an IPv6 capable ISP? DSL, cable, dialup even? Googling for this only shows one ISP in Japan that has IPv6."
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Google: ipv6 isp
I'm suprised. Not much there.
A speech...
For those of you about to ask why anyone would care about IPv6... well, we've all heard the answers, mostly larger address space (sounds surprisingly familiar to the 32-bit / 64-bit bickering we hear). If you're really interested, though, and want to see why it matters to you as a developer or IT person, I think IPv6 Essentials is a good, though not great, read. Developers will be disappointed but educated; sysadmins will be pleased and educated.
I've had this sig for three days.
I think currently there are only tunnel brokers who have a good eye on the IPv6 implementation for use by the general public. You may find that some of them do IPv6 native dialup, which is what the one i help run is considering providing.
Most ISPs will allow you to use gif tunneliing, or another form of tunneling so you can have tunneled ipv6 access via a tunnel broker, but beware, if your ISP bans vpns, they may take this as a vpn also (totally out of context) and stop all traffic.
Someone else on this story mentioned Oreillys IPv6 Essentials, which i also recommend. Its ISBN number is: 0-596-00125-8. It covers all you need to know, and more, so by the time you start actually using ipv6 rather than jsut running it alongside ipv4 on your lan, it works a treat.
Disclaimer: I help run ipng.org.uk, a UK ipv6 tunnel broker.
After the last /. article, I took it upon myself to learn more about IPv6 and maybe possibly start using it inside my private network. Well, what I found out was that I could use it on the *public* network, with hardly any hassle at all.
There's this really great feature in IPv6 that lets everyone with a (publicly routable) IPv4 address get 2^80 IPv6 addresses. Your IPv6 network is 2002:xxxx:yyyy::/48, where xxxxyyyy is the hex equivalent of your IPv4 address.
It's a system called "6to4" and basically involves the OS encapsulating all IPv6 packets into IPv4 and sending them through a tunnel to the "anycast" IPv4 address 192.88.99.1. This IP address is not that of one individual computer, but rather, the closest router actually on an IPv6 network. This router will then unencapsulate your packet and send it off into IPv6-land. Because your IPv4 address is embedded into the IPv6 address, every router on the IPv4 network knows how to reach you, given an IPv6 packet destined for your address, so you aren't tied to a particular tunnel endpoint like you are in some other schemes.
The best part about this is how easy it is to enable in OSX. Assuming you aren't behind NAT, to enable IPv6, just type:
sudo ip6config start-v6 en0; sudo ip6config start-stf en0
Of course replace en0 with whichever device you're using (en1 probably if you're using airport). All done! Now try something like "ping6 debian.ipv6.lcs.mit.edu" to make sure it's working. There's also traceroute6, and telnet works as well.
Unfortunately, ssh for OSX doesn't appear to be compiled for IPv6 yet. If it were, "ssh -6 host" should work. Also unfortunately, none of the browsers I've tried can resolve IPv6 DNS for some reason. However, at least Safari does work with explicit IP addresses, so http://[3ffe:501:4819:2000:210:f3ff:fe03:4d0]/ will work.
Have fun.
Like other ISPs using Cisco gear at the core, I definitely can't roll out IPv6 support until this matures, which will take a few years on Cisco's release schedule. I'd expect to see much more IPv6 availability then.
Aaron
Yep there is. Almost every OS includes those tools now. ping6, traceroute6, host -t AAAA name, telnet, etc.
Linux has them. Windows XP has them. MacOSX has them. xBSD has them (at least some of the xBSDs that is, I don't use them so I don't really know).
If you're using debian, apt-get install iputils-tracepath iputils-ping iputils-arping iproute.
That'll give you the traceroute6, ping6, tracepath6. It also gives you the "ip" command which is a replacement for ifconfig and route and a couple more things. nslookup and dig and host all will find IPv6 addresses, if you specify to do so by asking for records of type "AAAA" (in MacOSX, it finds them by default, but seemingly not in linux). Both telnet and ssh work fine.
Use http://www.freenet6.net to get yourself a free tunneling link to the 6bone. They'll also give you a /48 subnet if you tweak a few bits. ;-)
Plenty of clients available too. In Debian, simply apt-get it from your closest mirror
in austria you can use ATnet who seem to offer IPv6 since 1999. Their homepage is ath tml
http://www.atnet.at/produkte/internetzugang/ipv6.
There seem to be very few ISP's. Although I'd loved to see a large and quick take-up, the change-over will probably take many years and probably a decade or decades. There is a good concise article summarising the advantages of IPv6, Understanding IPv6 from PC Network Advisor [PDF], which I think every1 should read. The Google cache has a HTML version .
Joe Llywelyn Griffith Blakesley
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