It seems that the big players, at least, are finally bowing to the inevitable and starting to test IPv6.

I’ve got too many pieces that aren’t IPv6-ready to handle any kind of native IPv6. My computer hardware is all ready, and all of the operating systems I use support it (Ubuntu 11.04 “Natty Narwhal,” Mac OS X “Snow Leopard,” and Windows 7), but my venerable (read “really old”) router definitely doesn’t, and I don’t plan to replace it until I have to (the longer I wait, the better and cheaper the replacement will be). I’m fairly certain that neither my cable modem nor my ISP support it at present either.

But native isn’t the only way to do IPv6. In fact, I can get a successful response from running “ping -6 ipv6.google.com” on my Win7 virtual machine, and even go to the IPv6 address of it on that machine, though it redirects me to the IPv4 address. But I can’t do the same on my Ubuntu VM, for some reason (“ping6 ipv6.google.com” reports “Network is unreachable”) — I suspect Win7 comes with a built-in IPv6 tunnel, and Ubuntu doesn’t at present. The definitive test-ipv6 site says that both have perfect “IPv4 stability and readiness, when publishers offer both IPv4 and IPv6” (and “no problems are anticipated” on World IPv6 Day), but fail every test for IPv6.

I found a page describing how to set up IPv6 tunneling in Ubuntu, but it’s apparently outdated, there’s no tspc package in Natty’s repository. This one seems more up-to-date, but I ran out of interest before trying to set it up.

In any case, there’s no rush for end-users like me to get IPv6. It’s the ISPs that have to deal with it right now, or scramble later. I expect we’ll see more than a few of them scrambling before this is all over, and I reserve the right to laugh and point. 😉