Welcome IPv4 user
PING6
30Jul/101

Time for some audience participation

I have added a new feature to the blog template. You'll notice a thin coloured bar right at the top of the page.

If you see a red bar then you are using a legacy IPv4 connection. If - however - you see a green at the top of the page then you are visiting this site over IPv6. If you're sure that you've setup IPv6 but you still see a red bar then your IPv6 is most likely broken.

Now I'm interested in getting some feedback from you. If you reach this site over IPv6 then please post a comment about the service provider that you are using or the tunnelling mechanism that you are using.

Looking forward to some feedback.

23Jun/100

Getting together some IPv6 tools

In the same way as IPv4 you will need a toolbox in order to function efficiently.

The two most common tools will be ping and traceroute. Under Ubuntu you can access both of these via the command line as 'ping6' and 'traceroute6'. I personally prefer 'mtr' (MyTraceroute) to give me a continuous view of latencies and paths of packet. 'mtr' supports both IPv6 and IPv4 and will default to IPv6 when available. It is possible to force and IPv4 trace using the '-4' switch.

The most interesting IPv6 tool I have yet come across is the ShowIP plugin for firefox. This tool sits in the status bar of your browser and reports the IP address of the web server that you are visiting. This on its own is extremely useful. IPv4 addresses are displayed in red but the real gem is when you are connecting to an IPv6 website the IP is reported in green.

This plugin is quite useful to determine if your browser and the website are IPv6 aware. Run it in your browser for a few weeks and you may well be rather pleasantly surprised by the numerous websites that have quietly added IPv6 support to their servers.