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The Internet

IPv6 Friendly ISPs? 61

Posted by Cliff from the while-IPv4-refuses-to-hold-its-breath dept.
ps asks: "In light of our recent discussions, does anyone know of an IPv6 capable ISP? DSL, cable, dialup even? Googling for this only shows one ISP in Japan that has IPv6."
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IPv6 Friendly ISPs? More

IPv6 Friendly ISPs?

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  • I win (Score:5, Funny)

    by km790816 ( 78280 ) <wqhq3gx02 AT sneakemail DOT com> on Saturday February 15, 2003 @03:28AM (#5307712)
    Google: ipv6 isp [google.com]

    I'm suprised. Not much there.

  • Learn! (Score:4, Informative)

    by addaon ( 41825 ) <addaon+slashdot.gmail@com> on Saturday February 15, 2003 @03:34AM (#5307723)
    For those of you about to ask why anyone would care about IPv6... well, we've all heard the answers, mostly larger address space (sounds surprisingly familiar to the 32-bit / 64-bit bickering we hear). If you're really interested, though, and want to see why it matters to you as a developer or IT person, I think IPv6 Essentials [amazon.com] is a good, though not great, read. Developers will be disappointed but educated; sysadmins will be pleased and educated.
    • Forgot to say, that's an associates link. Sorry, bad habit. Don't want anyone to accuse me of being a bum (and don't want that to prevent people from reading the book), so here's a clean link [amazon.com].
    • Developers will be disappointed but educated; sysadmins will be pleased and educated.

      Speaking as a recovering sysadmin, isn't "pleased" a little strong to describe the mental state of a sysadmin?

  • all the best porn is on IPv6 (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    It's true! Haven't you ever heard of "6bone"?
  • I'm not even sure there is a truly complete IPv6 implementation.

    By which I mean, with all the tools including the slightly less common ones e.g. traceroute, ping nslookup etc. etc.

    Anyone?

    • Re:I might be wrong but... (Score:5, Informative)

      by foom ( 29095 ) on Saturday February 15, 2003 @05:53AM (#5307965) Homepage
      Yep there is. Almost every OS includes those tools now. ping6, traceroute6, host -t AAAA name, telnet, etc.

      Linux has them. Windows XP has them. MacOSX has them. xBSD has them (at least some of the xBSDs that is, I don't use them so I don't really know).

      If you're using debian, apt-get install iputils-tracepath iputils-ping iputils-arping iproute.

      That'll give you the traceroute6, ping6, tracepath6. It also gives you the "ip" command which is a replacement for ifconfig and route and a couple more things. nslookup and dig and host all will find IPv6 addresses, if you specify to do so by asking for records of type "AAAA" (in MacOSX, it finds them by default, but seemingly not in linux). Both telnet and ssh work fine.
    • I'm not even sure there is a truly complete IPv6 implementation.

      Of course there is. All free OSes have very good IPv6 support, as do WinXP, Solaris, and probably other commercial operating systems. I think MacOS X Jaguar supports it too.

      The iputils packages in Linux give you ping6, tracepath6, and traceroute6; similar tools exist for all other OSes that I've ever used. Hell, the WinXP ping can speak IPv6.

      See a post [slashdot.org] I made the other day about some services I run over IPv6. Namely web, ftp, and rsync.

      All the basic tools you need support IPv6. Some of the more advanced stuff like mobile IPv6 and anycast are still at various fairly early stages of development, but you probably won't notice their absense any time soon.

      noah

    • At least, complete enough. Heck, the Internet as it stands does not use the complete IPv4 specification.

      The important part is htis: There are many operating systems out there (and routers) that can talk ipv6 just fine, natively, and all communicate together, with no problems.

      When you say "all the tools"... none of the tools you mentioned are part of ipv6.. they are just that, tools. Not a single one of them is required for ipv6 functionality.

      Yes, we need more apps in ipv6.. but they won't come until more people get on ipv6. Hence the reason for asking for isps that support it natively.

  • Currently only tunnel brokers (Score:4, Informative)

    by Richard_at_work ( 517087 ) on Saturday February 15, 2003 @04:58AM (#5307873)
    I think currently there are only tunnel brokers who have a good eye on the IPv6 implementation for use by the general public. You may find that some of them do IPv6 native dialup, which is what the one i help run [ipng.org.uk] is considering providing.

    Most ISPs will allow you to use gif tunneliing, or another form of tunneling so you can have tunneled ipv6 access via a tunnel broker, but beware, if your ISP bans vpns, they may take this as a vpn also (totally out of context) and stop all traffic.

    Someone else on this story mentioned Oreillys IPv6 Essentials, which i also recommend. Its ISBN number is: 0-596-00125-8. It covers all you need to know, and more, so by the time you start actually using ipv6 rather than jsut running it alongside ipv4 on your lan, it works a treat.

    Disclaimer: I help run ipng.org.uk, a UK ipv6 tunnel broker.
    • $ ping6 ftp.netbsd.org
      PING6(56=40+8+8 bytes) 2001:618:4:2000::1072 --> 2001:4f8:4:b:2e0:81ff:fe21:6563
      16 bytes from 2001:4f8:4:b:2e0:81ff:fe21:6563, icmp_seq=0 hlim=58 time=427.629 ms
      16 bytes from 2001:4f8:4:b:2e0:81ff:fe21:6563, icmp_seq=1 hlim=58 time=299.468 ms
      16 bytes from 2001:4f8:4:b:2e0:81ff:fe21:6563, icmp_seq=2 hlim=58 time=315.316 ms
      16 bytes from 2001:4f8:4:b:2e0:81ff:fe21:6563, icmp_seq=3 hlim=58 time=321.123 ms
      ^C
      --- ftp.netbsd.org ping6 statistics ---
      4 packets transmitted, 4 packets received, 0% packet loss
      round-trip min/avg/max/std-dev = 299.468/340.884/427.629/50.706 ms

      Love You! Mean It! You Rock! Your Service Rocks! I'm finally on IPv6!

  • You don't need an ISP, use a 6to4 tunnel (Score:5, Interesting)

    by foom ( 29095 ) on Saturday February 15, 2003 @05:20AM (#5307916) Homepage
    After the last /. article, I took it upon myself to learn more about IPv6 and maybe possibly start using it inside my private network. Well, what I found out was that I could use it on the *public* network, with hardly any hassle at all.

    There's this really great feature in IPv6 that lets everyone with a (publicly routable) IPv4 address get 2^80 IPv6 addresses. Your IPv6 network is 2002:xxxx:yyyy::/48, where xxxxyyyy is the hex equivalent of your IPv4 address.

    It's a system called "6to4" and basically involves the OS encapsulating all IPv6 packets into IPv4 and sending them through a tunnel to the "anycast" IPv4 address 192.88.99.1. This IP address is not that of one individual computer, but rather, the closest router actually on an IPv6 network. This router will then unencapsulate your packet and send it off into IPv6-land. Because your IPv4 address is embedded into the IPv6 address, every router on the IPv4 network knows how to reach you, given an IPv6 packet destined for your address, so you aren't tied to a particular tunnel endpoint like you are in some other schemes.

    The best part about this is how easy it is to enable in OSX. Assuming you aren't behind NAT, to enable IPv6, just type:

    sudo ip6config start-v6 en0; sudo ip6config start-stf en0

    Of course replace en0 with whichever device you're using (en1 probably if you're using airport). All done! Now try something like "ping6 debian.ipv6.lcs.mit.edu" to make sure it's working. There's also traceroute6, and telnet works as well.

    Unfortunately, ssh for OSX doesn't appear to be compiled for IPv6 yet. If it were, "ssh -6 host" should work. Also unfortunately, none of the browsers I've tried can resolve IPv6 DNS for some reason. However, at least Safari does work with explicit IP addresses, so http://[3ffe:501:4819:2000:210:f3ff:fe03:4d0]/ will work.

    Have fun.

  • Cisco IPv6 (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Illusion ( 1309 ) on Saturday February 15, 2003 @05:37AM (#5307946) Homepage
    Cisco only offers IPv6 support [cisco.com] in their latest alpha-quality IOS series, which very recently added the all-important hardware-acceleration of IPv6 routing on larger routers.

    Like other ISPs using Cisco gear at the core, I definitely can't roll out IPv6 support until this matures, which will take a few years on Cisco's release schedule. I'd expect to see much more IPv6 availability then.

    • Have you cosidered other equipment, or are you biased towards Cisco? I know some people who are blind to better products because for some reason they're committed to buying from Cisco only.

      I am sure having a nice BSD IPV6 box as one of your routers wouldn't hurt your network.
      • I can't justify hardware purchases without (any) customer demand. Of course I could enable IPv6 tunnels for my interested users to a single IPv6-speaking router. But I'm not terribly interested in a half-assed solution. When I roll out IPv6, I want it to be natively over their existing connection.

        Some random BSD box also fits in to the "half-assed solution" category. The OS and hardware aren't as maintainable or fault tolerant, nor can they route packets with a full BGP table at anything resembling the speed of a Cisco or Juniper.

  • I thought that IPv6 standard isn't fully complete yet. What I've heard is that there is something going on with mobile IP that isn't decided yet. Anyone has any information about this?

  • Tunnel with freenet6 (Score:5, Informative)

    by kylegordon ( 159137 ) on Saturday February 15, 2003 @06:32AM (#5307997) Homepage
    Use http://www.freenet6.net [freenet6.net] to get yourself a free tunneling link to the 6bone. They'll also give you a /48 subnet if you tweak a few bits.
    Plenty of clients available too. In Debian, simply apt-get it from your closest mirror ;-)
    • 6to4 will drive the 6bone to extinction. There is already a proposal to shut down the 6bone. [ietf.org]

      The Internet backbone has coded IPv4 into silicon to support the speeds it does. The backbone will never change, so 6to4 utilizes it as a layer2 unicast interconnect, but *way* more efficiently than 6bone.

  • In Austria there are already IPv6 ISPs (Score:3, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 15, 2003 @08:24AM (#5308186)
    in austria you can use ATnet [atnet.at] who seem to offer IPv6 since 1999. Their homepage is at
    http://www.atnet.at/produkte/internetzugang/ipv6.h tml [atnet.at]

  • Dutch ISP xs4all offers it at no extra charge (Score:3, Informative)

    by OttoM ( 467655 ) on Saturday February 15, 2003 @08:51AM (#5308231)
    Checkout this announcement [xs4all.nl],

    I'm using it here for some months.

  • Link to Article Summarising Issue (Score:3, Informative)

    by sepluv ( 641107 ) <<moc.liamg> <ta> <yelsekalb>> on Saturday February 15, 2003 @11:01AM (#5308487)
    There seem to be very few ISP's. Although I'd loved to see a large and quick take-up, the change-over will probably take many years and probably a decade or decades. There is a good concise article summarising the advantages of IPv6, Understanding IPv6 from PC Network Advisor [PDF] [itp-journals.com], which I think every1 should read. The Google cache has a HTML version [216.239.39.100] .
  • . . .

    OK, I use these guys [aa.nu]. I'm happy with them but obviously biased.

    Check their NG archive : here [google.com] and see what you can find.

    In summary, not only will AAISP happily set you up with a v6 alloc (being a RIR) but they and their users are getting quite clued up on IPv6. AAISP's bias is towards Linux, so you may be happy in their company.

    Their v6 is tunneled to your site, because of limitations in the BT backhaul (a ATM cloud owned by our local monopoly) but this may change with SDSL + local exchange unbundling within the next 12 months.

    Of course, one's often quite limited in delivering v6 direct to hosts on your own net' party due to IOS inconsistencies (and I'm not certain Cisco or anyone else has complete v6 across their products) - but these NEC v4+v6 router - switches [nec.com] look very attractive IMO.

    Just some idle random thoughts, but I'd rate Andrews and Arnold as a "IPv6 Friendly" ISP. There are many other was to get yourself an allocation and tunnelling to peers or the 6bone however.

  • In response to a question I asked of Speakeasy Networks, my home ISP:

    At this time our networks does not support IPV6. We have discussed doing this in the future however nothing is in place.

    I suppose that Speakeasy is at least talking about it is a start.

  • I contacted the technical support departments for Telus(ADSL) and Shaw(cable) with regards to their support for IPv6. Telus and Shaw are the two major broadband providers in the province of British Columbia, Canada.

    Here are the results:

    - Telus [telus.net]: Technical support rep. actually knew what IPv6 was and said that I was the first person to ever ask him that question. His response (after talking to supervisors) was: "Telus will deploy IPv6 within two years".

    - Shaw [www.shaw.ca]: Technical support rep. did not know what I was talking about, escalated me to second level support, who then put me on hold for a while. Their response: not supported and there is no schedule to deploy IPv6. He said that Shaw "would do it when we start running out of IPs".

    I didn't bother to contact any small ISPs in town.
  • XS4ALL [xs4all.nl] in the Netherlands offers IPv6 to all their customers. On one type of DSL connection they even offer native IPv6. On other connections you can get a 6in4 tunnel including DNS delegation. You get a /48 routed through this tunnel.

    You can even get this tunnel when you only have dialup/shell with them but a fixed IP on for instance a cable modem.

    The best thing they did is making their binary newsserver newszilla available (read-only) for IPv6 users worldwide. This is the way to get people to try to get IPv6 working.

  • See http://aa.nu/ - on their ADSL service at least, you just check a box to get an IPv6 allocation alongside your IPv4 addresses.
  • Hurricane Electric, at he.net will give you IPv6 colocation if you like (not sure what kind of use you have for the connection). They also provide 4to6 tunnels.

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