I set up IPv6 through 6to4, and found it to be surprisingly easy and simple — subject to the major proviso that you only want IPv6 on one box. This should be easy, 6to4 gives you every address from 2002:abc:123:0:0:0:0:0 to 2002:abc:123:ffff:ffff:ffff:ffff:ffff to play with. To get it on other boxes, you need to have the end of the 6to4 tunnel route IPv6 packets, and the end-hosts have to get IPv6 addresses from it. Which turns out to be a problem. It’s easy to give your router 2002:abc:123:0:0:0:0:0, but giving out IPv6 address doesn’t work — the client support for getting IPv6 addresses over DHCP is zilch. Easier to set up Teredo.

This is worrisome. Client vendors have been complaining that the ISPs aren’t deploying IPv6 routing and patting themselves on the back for having their systems support IPv6, without considering that it only works if manually set-up. Suppose some ISP did do all the work of making its network route IPv6 — their customers still aren’t going to be on the IPv6 net, because their computers never ask for IPv6 addresses over DHCP so the ISP never gives them any. Are we expecting each one to call customer support for their IPv6 address and how to tell it to their system? The Internet has as many users as it does because the software lets the computers be plugged together and figure out how to talk on their own, without the user having to know how any of that works. IPv6 can’t work until that’s the case for it as well. If reading an RFC ever enters the picture, you lose: 99.9% of the Internet’s users won’t bother. It has to be made so transparent that the end user needs to do nothing and won’t even notice that another routing protocol is processing the packets.