I currently sit on a very fast network at my dorm (100 Mbit fiber). My cheap Linksys wrt54gl is currently often the limiting factor when I’m downloading big files, such as Linux ISOs or video podcasts, from the web. The speed is often limited by it to around 3 MB/s. It’s annoying to have such a fast connection to the world and not being able to host anything, because you’re behind a NAT’ed address. This is a problem that IPv6 can solve.
My ISP doesn’t support IPv6 themselves, so I was forced to use a dynamic tunnel at sixxs.net. I’ve set up two dynamic tunnels, so I can access my desktop computer from my laptop, no matter where I am in the world. A short test transferring The Source video podcast using SCP gave the following result:
the_source_episode007.mp4 100% 128 MB 989.5 KB/s 02:12
That’s pretty impressive! These speeds makes Pv6 very usefull at this stage, for anything I would care to use it for. Seems like the broker sixxs.net is not a serious bottleneck.
It’s very easy to setup a dynamic IPv6 tunnel in ubuntu. First request a dynamic tunnel from a broker, e.g. sixxs.net, and then install the aiccu tunnel client:
$ sudo apt-get install aiccu
The installation will ask you for the user name, password and possibly the ID of the tunnel. Test the connection afterwards by going to ipv6.google.com. Welcome to the world of IPv6!