There is admittedly a geek factor involved, but IPv4 address space exhaustion is real and we all get to make individual decisions about whether we're going to embrace IPv6 early or be flung there when the cost of the remaining IPv4 address space goes through the roof.

Think of any major development in the last years on the web. Think AJAX or CSS. It's going to take some adventurous first adopters to get the ball rolling. I'd like to be one of those guys.

Read: anyone with IPv6 experience is going to be able to make a killing as a contractor.

*bump*

I've been using Hurricane Electric's tunnel brokers... while they work just fine most of the time, they really don't seem to be production quality services (eg maintenance with no notifications). It would definitely be preferable if Linode provided the service natively.

They basically seem suitable to get yourself an allocation and make sure it works like you expect it to, and not much more than that.

I think IPv6 would be nice just due to the large amount of IP's I could use. I run multiple domains on my server and assigning each one an IP would be great.

The issue with offering native IPv6 is that most datacenters are not offering it yet. The company I work for does a good bit of colocation, and we have yet to find that touts IPv6 (its not a req for us atm thought).

AFAIK many (most, all) of the backbone providers in the US do not have a production IPv6 deployment. Until that happens I doubt many colo facilities will offer it.

HE and other services work fairly well, in my experience. I do sometimes have issues of tunnel stability; sometimes they go down (and don't rebuild).

The closest we might get to a "native" ipv6 offering would be if Linode would graciously deploy it on their routers and tunnel to a provider (preferably go ahead and get their /ridiculous allocation and multihome to different providers/locations).

Any news on when this may be expected? I'm currently tunneling through HE but it would be nice not have the extra latency.

Probably true of tier 2 / tier 3 providers. But tier 1 (the guys you think of when you think 'backbone provider') generally already support IPv6. This is probably partly because of a requirement the U.S. government set forth a few years ago -- no lucrative defense contract without IPv6 network support (as an actual checklist item for evaluating RFPs). A pretty good carrot!

I have buddies who works for network engineering at one of the tier 1s, and they've been offering full (native and tunneled) IPv6 services for a few years now.

As for my gear (and Linode), I've IPv6-ized (and tested all the weird corner cases) all my apps and servers over two pretty intense weekends a few years ago. Can be done, no problem.

I'm looking forward to the day Linode eventually is able to offer native IPv6, but unfortunately, that's probably still a while off due to colo network providers' offerings and pricing. For now, tunnel through the likes of HE seems to be adequate.

I also would like native IPv6 support. I've been on the fence about buying a Linode instance for quite awhile, instead hosting my own servers and running 6to4 tunnels. I do need another system that isn't located in the texas area so that my website doesn't go down during hurricanes. IPv6 native support would be the one thing that would seal it and make it even be my primary server.

Until then, I keep looking at Dyndns Springserver and hoping either the price goes down or I get a raise to afford it.

You do realize that Dallas is something like 300 miles from the coast, right?

Also the HE IPv6 tunnel is right next door (network-wise, and possibly physically as well) to Linode's Dallas data center. Tunneling through it for IPv6 adds basically zero latency.

But despite all that, you're right, native IPv6 support would be great!

True, but I like a little more geographic diversity in case of regional problems with the net or power. The California one is tempting though because it's also supposedly right next to a HE tunnel server. Once I finish getting my system so it can be at more than one place at once, I'll look into the CA site.

Uh, you do realize that a major earthquake in the bay area should be a bigger concern than the remnant of a hurricane dumping some water on dallas.

But they probably won't both happen on the same day, thus the argument for geographic diversity.

For anyone trying to firewall ipv6 with linode...

The current "Latest 2.6 Series" kernel that linode provides is 2.6.18.8-linode16. A lot of the basics work just fine... until you try to match state. This means that the default stateful firewall that centos (and likely many others) provides... simply doesn't work.

If you want to match a rule based on state, you need to use a minimum kernel version of 2.6.20. The minimum one that linode provides that will work is the 2.6.24.4-linode8.

Also, a huge +1 to native IPv6 for linode.

I am currently using HE's TunnelBroker, but I would really like to see native ipv6.

I am also currently using HE's TunnelBroker, and I would also really like to see native IPv6.
IPv6 RDNS support would also make a good addition (I don't know any decent alternative to afraid.org).