As you may have noticed, there's now a new "IPv6 Ready" icon on the right of this page. It's the last piece of my latest project experimenting with IPv6; it now means that my whole home network and this website run over IPv6 as well as IPv4. If you're lucky, it will have turned green like the example on the left - this means you are connecting to this blog natively over IPv6. As I've spent the last few weeks playing with this technology, I thought I'd write my notes up here in the hopes that it will help someone else. I'll cover briefly some of the IPv6 concepts that I initially struggled with, and in the next article show how I set up IPv6 at home through a tunnel-broker despite my ISP (Virgin Media) not offering native IPv6 connectivity. I'll also cover setting up a publicly accessible website over IPv6 and share some firewall scripts and other tools I've found useful.

I found that the hardest part of getting my head round IPv6 was forgetting what I previously knew about IPv4 networking. The concepts of NAT, private address space, CIDR subnet masks and so on was getting in the way of me understanding what is ultimately a much simpler system. Let's face it, the current IPv4 status quo is pretty broken, and we've got the Internet this far based on a series of hacks built upon hacks. Sure, it sort of works but it's pretty ugly - and I think it's only because we're so used to IPv4 concepts that I never took a step back and thought about how broken it truly is. 

Needless to say, although the theory should be equally applicable to Windows systems, all this is all written with a heavy Unix-bias as that's what I use most of them time. Also, if you notice any glaring mistakes or omissions I would be grateful if you'd leave a comment below, and I'll go back and edit this article ASAP. Click the "Continue reading" link for the full article...