Sunday, January 18, 2009

How to get IPv6 working

As of today, I finally have working IPv6 connectivty. It's taken me a while, and there were a lot of false starts and dead ends, so I thought I'd share how I did it.

  1. Hear about this new IPv6 thing - it sounds neat!
  2. Look up how to get connected to it
  3. Give up immediately because of the wall of intimidating jargon
  4. Wait a few months
  5. Try again, learning the jargon this time
  6. Get a tunnel from Hurricane Electric
  7. Go through steps to set up tunnel, only to discover that it doesn't work
  8. Give up again
  9. Wait for a year or so
  10. Try again, this time with Teredo
  11. Get a tunnel which works well initially, but ends up being somewhat unstable and annoying to use
  12. Give up again
  13. Wait for a few more months
  14. Try again, this time getting a tunnel from SixXS
  15. Fill out tons of personal information because apparently it would be terrible news if the wrong people got their hands on IPv6
  16. Attempt to set up tunnel
  17. Run into SixXS incredibly strict restrictions on common things you would do with a tunnel, such as setting it up in the first place
  18. Give up again
  19. Wait for a few more months
  20. Move into an apartment, with a roommate who uses DD-WRT. DD-WRT supports ipv6 in all forms, so this can't possibly go wrong, right?
  21. Discover that the latest version of DD-WRT has dodgy ipv6 support, because they happened to leave it out of some builds for no good reason. Whoops!
  22. Attempt to use Hurricane Electric again
  23. Set up tunnel - this time, believe it or not, it... fails completely, again.
  24. Contact HE tech support
  25. Get response from HE tech support - "it will never work give up now"
  26. Give up again
  27. Wait a month or two
  28. Try to set up 6to4 tunneling on the router
  29. Gaze in wonder as the tunnel actually works!
  30. Remove the old Hurricane Electric configuration stuff, breaking everything for some reason
  31. Wail; gnash teeth
  32. Google for 6to4 troubleshooting - turns out that this kind of information does not meet Google's stringent standards for what should be on the internet
  33. Go to #ipv6 on Freenode, on a hunch that they know what they're doing
  34. These guys are such badasses that they'll find and solve the last remaining problem in about 15 minutes
  35. Now you have IPv6!
  36. ???
  37. Profit
Now, that wasn't so hard, was it? When we run out of IP addresses in just over two years, I feel confident that everybody will be able to switch to IPv6 smoothly.

3 comments:

Kiriska said...

lol, I thought your ISP had to support it before you can have IPv6? I dunno! I pretty much stopped at step one. :c

Anonymous said...

Æther supports profit!

Frank Church said...

I would like to watch steps 31 and 15 of that process. I believe in keeping my friends close.