Hello IPv6

[rcs2k4]

Colour me impressed. My ISP made the leap to support IPv6 already, and emailed all customers advising them how to use it this afternoon. They also hope to have a 6t04 gateway online within the next few weeks (a what?). What may be worth mentioning to those of you with Netgear Routers (mine's the DGND3300 V2), is that most of them have a hidden menu to enable IPv6 connectivity. Log-in to your router's main set-up page (example: http://192.168.1.1/), and then follow that with ipv6.htm in the adress bar. Follow on screen steps after that. If all works then = coolness:



Now, what can I do with this new-found wonderfullness? I bet not a lot at the moment, but I really am taken back they reacted to roll this out so quickly.

[notfred]

Congratulations, you get to see the dancing turtle at http://www.kame.net/

EDIT: Actually it's your router and not your ISP that is doing this, that address is a 6to4 address and it embeds your IPv4 address . I know you blocked out the last two octets of your IPv4 address, but they are recoverable from what you show of your IPv6 6to4 address and also in the hostname shown there. There will be a 6to4 server out on the net that is also responsible, it could be your ISP, try a traceroute to 192.88.99.1 and see who is running it as that is the IPv4 anycast for the 6to4 server. For me that would be Hurricane Electric in New York City, it goes from my ISP to torontointernetxchange.net and then to he.net and ends in New York City, but as this is an anycast address it will differ for other people.

[UberGerbil]

You can try hitting http://ipv6.google.com or http://www.v6.facebook.com (or, as ars pointed out, http://2620:0:1cfe:face:b00c::3 -- the facebook is trying to be teh 1337 with teh hexor humor)

Now, what can I do with this new-found wonderfullness? I bet not a lot at the moment, but I really am taken back they reacted to roll this out so quickly.

Quickly? I guess, if you consider a decade or more as a fast reaction time. IPv6 was first standardized in 1995. The realization that IPv4 addresses were rapidly running out, and the consequent push to get IPv6 adopted, started years ago. Your ISP undoubtedly has been working on this roll-out for some time; it only seems pro-active compared to most other network operators, who are woefully slower.

Edit: whups, as notfred points out, you may be giving your host too much credit

[rcs2k4]

Thanks for the replys both. On the trace route front, it looks like my ISP is controlling this 6t04 server? There are 4 hops to get to 192.88.99.1:

My router: 192.168.1.1 then to...
Some random server: telehouse-gw2-l01.idnet.net [212.69.63.51] then to another...
Random server: telehouse-gw5-e4-400.idnet.net [212.69.63.245] then to...
Destination: 192.88.99.1

Total trip time: 14 Ms

I don't see servers there belonging to anyone else except my ISP? I'm also confused as those are "old" IP addresses - Should they not be that new type that makes no sense when you look at them?

Maybe my ISP has not fully implimented this yet as you both say. The DNS servers used belong to my ISP, so those must have been upgraded? The email they sent also goes on to say that in the next 2-3 weeks I will be given a unique IPv6 address, and will be able to use something called IPv6 NAT-PP (Again, a what?). Mmmm, this gets kinda confusing pretty quickly.

[notfred]

Yup, looks like it is your ISP idnet that is providing the 6-to-4 server so some credit there. What is happening is your router is running as a 6-to-4 client and providing IPv6 on your home LAN. It then takes those IPv6 packets, wraps them up in IPv4 and then sends them across the IPv4 Internet to the closest 6-to-4 server (in this case belonging to your ISP). This 6-to-4 server takes off the IPv4 wrapping and sends the IPv6 packet out over the real IPv6 Internet.

I think you have a typo in the second part, I think you mean IPv6 NAT-PT which is IPv6 Network Address Translation – Protocol Translation. The idea there is that you don't need both IPv6 and IPv4 addresses on all the equipment, the IPv6 NAT-PT will sit in the middle and do a conversion between the IPv6 and IPv4 when needed. This means that stuff that is IPv6 only is accessible to devices with IPv4 and IPv4 stuff is accessible to IPv6 devices.

Sounds like your ISP is doing a good job with a decent migration strategy, first bringing up a 6-to-4 server for those who are capable to experiment running dual-stack and then they will later provide real IPv6 but with a NAT-PT server to allow talking across the protocols.

[jmdogg]

well IPv6 day wasn't too long ago and many companies and higher ed's got involved which made a decent splash of awareness. i've been pretty excited about using it but is anyone else feeling odd when actually writing or configuring IPv6 addresses? i mean, a quick PING just isn't quick anymore

[notfred]

Only if you are using addresses and not hostnames. I've brought up a tunnel to http://tunnelbroker.net/ and score 10/10 for both IPv4 and IPv6 at http://test-ipv6.com/ . I've started noticing that more of my traffic than I thought is actually heading via IPv6 when I fire up a sniffer to troubleshoot some other problem.