I won’t go over the back­ground of IPv6, but suf­fice it to say I think it’s rather keen and I’d like to see it catch on as it would sim­plify a lot of things. It’s got a ser­i­ous chicken-​​and-​​egg prob­lem: con­tent pro­viders don’t see the need to sup­port IPv6 until their read­ers are using IPv6; end-​​users don’t care about IPv6 until con­tent pro­viders do.

We’ve been using IPv6 (Jasna may or may not be aware of it) on our net­work for about half a year. Since my ISP, Tek­Savvy, doesn’t route IPv6 traffic I’ve had to resort to 6to4 for the time being to pre­tend that I’m part of the great IPv6 Inter­net. For IPv6-​​capable sites, I con­nect over IPv6 and for those that aren’t, I con­nect over IPv4. It’s all very trans­par­ent, so I checked my router stats to see how much of our band­width was actu­ally hap­pen­ing over IPv6 and it was only about 0.01%, very discouraging.

A large pro­por­tion of our band­width comes from Usenet, so I went to see if I could find IPv6-​​capable Usenet serv­ers to help fight the good fight. As it turns out, there are three free Usenet serv­ers which are IPv6 cap­able, all of them being in the Neth­er­lands. I tried all three and one of them actu­ally worked for me.

Finally, I decided to make this site, Wiz­ard­like, IPv6-​​capable. Well my host­ing com­pany, Dream­host, doesn’t sup­port IPv6, but there’s a friendly site, again in the Neth­er­lands, called IPv6Proxy, which will proxy any hos­ted site. Thus, if you want to con­nect via IPv6, you can no go to ipv6​.wiz​ard​like​.ca (note: even if you aren’t IPv6-​​capable, that site will still work. Due to how IPv6Proxy is set up, the host­name has to be IPv4 reach­able). The reason I cre­ated a sep­ar­ate domain for the IPv6-​​reachable site is that it can be rather slow. Con­sider:

If you’re like me hanging out in Canada, con­nect­ing to IPv6Proxy in the Neth­er­lands just so that it can con­nect to Dream­host in Cali­for­nia and then relay the web­site back to you is a little silly and adds about 100ms of latency.

In addi­tion to ipv6​.wiz​ard​like​.ca there’s also ipv6​.pro​jects​.wiz​ard​like​.ca.