Thursday, February 10, 2011

IPv6 Readiness

June 8th, 2011 is World IPv6 Day. This is the day when major websites such as Facebook, Google, Yahoo and many others switch to IPv6 from the usual IPv4 to offer their content to internet users for a 24-hour "test flight".

You may test your ipv6 readiness by browsing to this site: http://test-ipv6.com/.

Accessing IPv6 websites does not come without some tinkering from the users' end. There are references as to how this is done and I have chosen to use tunnelbroker.net (HE.NET) with the help of some video here

As a result, my laptop is ready for the World IPv6 Day and I can browse IPv6 websites although I am behind IPv4 routers doing NAT to SmartBro, our ISP.


It is also interesting to find out that NAT seems to have been bypassed and I can access my laptop from the internet using the assigned IPv6 address--- something impossible with IPv4 with SmartBro's assignment of private IP addresses (such as 192.168.x.x).

I can access Google's IPv6 server from my laptop:


I can ping6 my laptop from the internet:


I can browse my laptop's IIS7 web server from the internet:


Of course, I don't want to be vulnerable from out there and I have to rely more on the firewall. Windows 7 has the Firewall Turned On by default and could be secure enough for most users.

Happy and safe surfing!

P.S. Unless your ISP and your router is IPv6 capable and offers DHCPv6 ip addresses to your PCs, you'll have to use IPv6 tunnels for this service.