Today was a great day for me on a personal front – I finally have native IPv6 in my home office! I am no longer using an IPv6 tunnel!
To give some context, I live in the small city of Keene in the southwestern corner of New Hampshire, quite close to the neighboring U.S. states of Vermont and Massachusetts. For reasons dating back to a former cable system, our little city is a pocket of Time Warner Cable (TWC) customers while almost all the surrounding regions are Comcast customers. When I joined the Internet Society back in September 2011, one of the first things I did was contact TWC to see about getting native IPv6. Through some of the World IPv6 Launch work as well as IETF work I came to know some of the TWC staff and of course asked them, too. There’s a long story in there (a lot of which relates to being a small island of connectivity and apparently having older equipment that needed to be updated)… but in the meantime I was in fact getting IPv6 in my home office using an IPv6 tunnel via Hurricane Electric’s outstanding Tunnelbroker.net. Still, I’ve been wanting native IPv6 connectivity.
At IETF 88 in Vancouver last month Lee Howard of TWC told me that IPv6 had been turned on for Keene and that it should work when I got home. This week I finally had a chance to see if it could work. It didn’t… but some troubleshooting determined that the firmware needed to be updated in my cable modem. Once that was done and I made a few changes on my Linux-based home server/gateway, everything was in order and I was absolutely thrilled to be able to go to http://test-ipv6.com and get these results:
I’m now natively on the IPv6 Internet!
Given that I work on this Internet Society Deploy360 Programme and write here about IPv6 all the time, this is a rather important step for my little home office! Many thanks to Lee and his colleague Jason for their help. The good news, too, is that another techie friend of mine in Keene who is also a TWC customer learned of this news and he, too, is now working to make sure his home network works with IPv6. All good stuff!
Another outcome is that I realized that it would be really good to add to our list of IPv6 resources some focused tutorials on how to configure home server/gateway/router software to work with IPv6. I’m sure there are some good tutorials out there for some of the various packages… and where such documents don’t exist I would think they would be relatively straightforward to write for others. I’m going to write up what I did soon as an example… and then may be putting the call out there to others of you to see if we can get some other tutorials for different software packages.
Anyway, I’m doing a little IPv6 dance here in little, old Keene! Good times for an IPv6 advocate!