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US Has More IPv6 Eyeballs Than Asia, Because of Apple
An anonymous reader writes "Google has been checking to see who's using IPv6. According to the company's tracking, half of all IPv6-capable systems seen by Google are Macs, helping the US land in fifth place in percentage of IPv6 users world wide, ahead of China and Japan."
Guess I should have read the article first. Looks like this result is because Apple's Airport Extreme AP automatically sets up 6to4 (which is the 'anycast' based system I was referring to previously, but got the name backwards), and because the router itself supports 6to4, there's no problem giving the systems behind the router a public IPv6 address in the sub-net of the 6to4 address.
I didn't realize there were any IPv6-capable home routers on the market (other than routers that have been hacked to replace the OEM firmware with OpenWRT or DD-WRT). Kudos to Apple for showing some leadership here. Anyone know of any other makers with affordable home routers with IPv6?
From the article, I picked up the reason for this result (but not until after posting a similar question, I must confess). Most home computer users, regardless of their platform, tend to connect to the internet through some sort of router device. Most of these routers use IPv4 only, and use NAT to share the Internet connection.
Many Mac users, instead of using some 'generic' WiFi access point, instead use Apple's Airport Extreme router. Per the article, Airport Extreme's have support for IPv6 built right into the router, and the router will *automatically* route IPv6 traffic using the 6to4 standard (which basically tunnels the traffic over the IPv4 connection from the ISP).
I suspect that if you connected your Ubuntu computer (or Vista, or XP if you installed IPv6 manually) to the Internet using an Airport Extreme, then IPv6 would work fine under Ubuntu too. That is, I think the 'magic' here that makes IPv6 "just work" is in the router, not in the OS.
That's exactly right. To get IPv6 working on my system at home, I just set up the router. My Powerbook, my Ubuntu machines, and my wife's Windows Vista machine, all automatically picked up IPv6 and can all connect to http://ipv6.google.com/
For those rolling their own router boxes, you can see what I did here (caution - it's my blog and this is a tag that brings up a bunch of articles, start reading at the bottom...) I used 6to4 as well. It's worth getting a static IP address if you plan to use 6to4, and it's also worth noting that some ISPs, notable BellSouth/AT&T FastAccess, actually block use of 6to4, for reasons I don't really understand. Before wasting any time on it, try to ping 192.88.99.1 from a machine directly connected to the Internet. If you get responses, you can do 6to4. If you don't, you're going to have to try one of the IPv6 tunnel brokers, which is a supremely inefficient way of doing everything and makes you dependent upon the goodwill of a third party.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.