BT Exact IPv6 Tunnel Broker is back
It looks like the BT Exact IPv6 tunnel broker is finally back up and running after being offline for a week. It seems they had a hardware failure of some kind which knocked out their whole TB operation. I appreciate this is a free service, but it’s still a pain not having it available. That said, I was reluctant to change to another broker since so far, ignoring this incident, their service seems to be pretty good:
- Very simple to set up - no messing around with special applications.
- UK based, so only 6 hops outside of my ADSL provider’s network, and 4 away from my hosted server’s network. In both cases it’s a single hop straight from the provider’s network on to the BT network.
- Supports reverse DNS delegation.
- Simple interface for setting up and modifying tunnels.
Finding an alternative to this would have been hard. Unless anyone has any recommendations?
Obviously this is not an ideal long-term solution; I still have to tunnel over the relevant IPv4 networks to get to the broker. What I really want is native IPv6 straight from my service providers. I guess I expect this sort of service more from my hosting company, and when I last asked they said it’s something they wanted to look at. For the average person, though, this is something that needs to come from the ISP, but that’s probably a long way off.
March 23rd, 2006 at 7:20 pm
I’m using 6to4 these days, which gives you an IPv6 range based on your IPv4 address (2002:ipv4:addr::), and is pretty trivial to set up; it’s anycast-based so it should find a nearby router automatically. I haven’t played with reverse delegation yet, but it looks like you can get it set up automatically.
March 26th, 2006 at 10:54 am
… that is, in theory you can get it set up automatically, but having tried I haven’t been able to get it to work.
March 26th, 2006 at 11:17 am
I’ve had a read about 6to4 and in principle it looks like a flexible solution. The only thing I don’t like is that it’s tied to your IPv4 address, which means if you change IP for any reason your IPv6 address changes too.
With a tunnel broker you don’t get that. But, the downside of using a broker, as I’ve discovered, is that you’re entirely dependent on one point of access, whilst with 6to4 you’re not.
What I’d really like is some way of an IPv6 range being allocated to me that I could then route without using a single broker. I guess that’s not going to be possible until I can at least get native IPv6 to my router.