The cool part about IPv6 is that well it's already here. You can get onto the IPv6 Internet and look
around there is IPv6 Web sites all kinds of stuff out there.
The challenge we have is that Internet service providers in general do not provide IPv6 to their customers.
So we can't do what we call native IPv6.
However you can get onto the IPv6 internet but you have to do something.
It's basically tunneling.
Let me show you what I mean.
So here's an IP packet.
Now if you take a close look at this you'll notice that we don't have IPv4 addresses.
We have IPv6 addresses on there.
So what I propose we do is we're going to encapsulate our IPv6 data inside of IPv4.
And what that's going to allow us to do is take our data put an IP address on it and then send it to
an endpoint.
And when he gets to that end point which is going to be some server up in the sky someplace it'll strip
this away and then leave us with just the IPv6 stuff. Tunneling basically means to do like a VPN between
your system and some system that's connected to the IPv6 Internet.
Now Microsoft in particular recognized that this was going to be a big problem and built in a lot of
tunneling protocols into Windows.
Let me show you what I mean with that.
So here I am at a command prompt and if I do an IP config one of the things I want you to notice is
all this stuff down here. You see the words tunnel adapter?
These are built in tools that Windows provides to give you a way to try to get to the IPv6 Internet.
Now there's two in particular here that I want to talk about.
There is Teredo and there's 6TO4. Teredo is a very primitive very slow horrible way to connect
to the IPv6 Internet.
The cool part to Teredo is that it's free and you can go online there's a bunch of Web sites that show
you how to configure your Windows system use Teredo to get on the IPv6 Internet.
The big one I want to talk about is right here and that is 6TO4. 6TO4 is pretty much exactly
as it's named.
It takes IPv6 packets and encapsulates them into IPv4 . Now
just because you have these tunneling adapter protocols that show up when you type IP config most of
us are going to use third party tools.
There's a number of them out there but the one I like the best by far is called the gogo client.
It's completely free.
Anybody can do this and all you need to do is to go to gogo 6 dot com.
Download a copy.
Install it.
It pretty much works out of the box.
I've got a copy of it right here.
And this is what the gogo6 client looks like.
It's not too terribly exciting.
And that's good.
Pretty much has started up and it will find a gogo server that will connect you to the IPv6 Internet.
So the fun part is now once this is up and running, there's just almost nothing you do. You install it and it
go. You are on the IPv6 Internet.
Now what makes this kind of cool is because this is a tunneling protocol.
It does exactly as you'd expect like a VPN.
It creates a virtualized network card and this network card right here.
I don't know if you can read that says gogo6 virtual multi tunnel adapter.
So when you install the software it makes this virtualised
NIC and it uses your IPv4 connection to get to an IPv6 box.
So if we take a look at here.
type IP config one more time.
Now what I want to show you is that it's a local area connection 2. And there it is.
So this is a local area connection 2 and you'll see that I have a public internet IPv6 address. So
if I'm on the IPv6 internet then I should be able to do stuff like this.
So here's a particular Web site called test-ipv6.com.
There's a lot of these out here but this is one of them.
And basically it says yes you are running an IPv6, we can see you, everything's great. Let's go someplace
that is IPv6 only. So you can see I've gone to IPv6.google.com and what do you got.
Well you've got Google.
The challenge with IPv6 is that once you get on to IPv6 you think something new and different is
going to happen.
Well it doesn't IPv6 it's just a new numbering system.
When IPv6 is running right when you go to Google guess what you get Google.
And when you go to Amazon.com you can buy a book.
And when you go to eBay you can buy used computers or whatever you buy.
The most important thing to appreciate about IPv6 is it doesn't change the Internet.
Now granted there are Web sites for example that are only IPv6. You simply can't get to them any other
way but they're weird and boring and nerdy.
The really great power of IPv6 is that when it's fully installed and up and running and perfect, from
an application standpoint you're still just on the Internet.