How to use ipv6 on your home pc when your ISP doesn’t yet support it.

IpV6 will eventually be the internet standard, and with only around 2 years left before ipv4 is completely exhausted, you might as well get used to the fact ipv6 is here to stay. I wont get into the technical details of ipv6 as you can read more about this here : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ipv6 . What I will do is tell you how to get ipv6 connectivity enabled on your local machine using free resources available on the net. The first thing you will need is a tunnelbroker for ipv6. My personal recommendation would be Hurricane Electric’s service http://www.tunnelbroker.net/ . All you need to do is sign up with the service, login and click create regaular tunnel, fill in the ipv4 endpoint (which is your public ipv4 address – you can go to http://whatsmyip.org to get this) select the location closest to you and click create. Once you have done this, your ipv6 tunnel is ready to be used. To get everything working from your local pc is the tricky part, but I will break it down into easy to understand terms – below is my network configuration and you can apply my example to your own to connect to the tunnel.

Verizon FIOS Internet (74.x.x.x) ==> Router/Gateway (192.168.1.1) ==> My workstation (192.168.1.7)

as I mentioned previously in this article, when configuring your ipv4 endpoint you would use your public ipv4 address which in my case is a 74.x.x.x address. If your machine was directly connected to this network you would need to add a route that would enable connectivity to the tunnel with this ip addres, however in my case I am behind a nat’d router so I need to setup the route for my local ipv4 address. For windows Vista, I would use the following commands to make this happen.

netsh interface ipv6 add v6v4tunnel IP6Tunnel 192.168.1.7 216.218.224.42
netsh interface ipv6 add address IP6Tunnel 2001:470:1f0e:4ee::2
netsh interface ipv6 add route ::/0 IP6Tunnel 2001:470:1f0e:4ee::1

Note: you will need to run the cmd window as administator in windows vista

Within the tunnelbroker.net control panel there is some example configurations you can use at the bottom of your screen. This can serve as a guide but not as a absolute as everyone’s configurations are different. The good part is that Hurricane Electric has a support email they are happy to help you get rolling with the tunnel.  – Dustin