The goal was to
- sign up with a tunnel broker
- get an IPv6 subnet
- set up my home Linux server as the endpoint
- configure said server to advertise itself as an IPv6 router to the home LAN.
SixXs had been recommended to me as a tunnel broker, so I headed over to their site and signed up. Then I waited. And waited. I never got a response from them, so my IP6 efforts were thwarted for the weekend.
This weekend I did a Google search and found Go6 on Wikipedia's List of IPv6 Tunnel Brokers. Within about 10 minutes I had done all of the steps above. Four computers on my network (the Linux server, 2 Mac laptops and 1 Eee PC running Ubuntu) got world-routable IPv6 addresses without any configuration changes or even a reboot.
"Great," I thought, "now I can access my home computers directly without having to set up tunneling each time to get through our NAT/router." But, IPv6 addresses are a pain to remember. So I headed over to No-ip.com, my preferred dynamic DNS provider, to add a few hosts to my account. Only to find that it doesn't support IPv6 AAAA records.
Ok, a bit of googling for "IPv6 dynamic dns", and I find www.dns6.org, which has a promising name. Except that its page never loads. I'm about to blow it off when a thought strikes me.... "Surely they wouldn't..."
I check Firefox's "about:config" panel and search for ipv6. Aha, it's got an option: "network.dns.disableIPv6". I double-click to toggle its value to "true", disabling IPv6 name resolution, and reload the page. And it works.
That's right -- dns6.org's server has an IPv6 record, which web browsers will try to honor, but its web server doesn't actually RESPOND on that address.
I double check by re-enabling IPv6 in Firefox and visiting http://ipv6.google.com/. Sure enough, there's the Google home page with the animated logo letting you know you've got the ipv6 version.
But it gets better -- later in the evening I'm searching for neat IPv6 sites to test. Google links me to a page on sixxs.net only it doesn't load. It's got the same problem -- its HTTP server doesn't seem to want to serve pages over IPv6. I can ping the address. I can even connect to port 80. But requesting a page just hangs.
This reminds me of something I read about Google's IPv6 services:
We continuously conduct detailed measurements on the quality of IPv6 connectivity, and our latest results show that making Google services generally available over IPv6 at this time would lead to connection problems and increased latency for a small number of users. User experience is very important to us, and we do not want to impact users on networks that do not yet fully support IPv6. We will continue to re-evaluate the situation as the IPv6 Internet evolves.
Which sounds a bit like a chicken-and-the-egg problem. If people don't start using IPv6, how will we know that there are issues with IPv6 providers? And with crummy IPv6 service, who wants to be the first to use it? But it's good for us, right? It's the future, right?
I ended up going with FreeDNS for my dynamic AAAA record. I've still got ipv6 enabled, but if it ends up poorly impacting my web experience I may end up disabling it.
