Although Rackspace is working on IPv6 support, it’s always nice to be some steps ahead. The following techniques probably works with other providers as well, providing you have enough access to the virtual server. The tests where done using Ubuntu 10.10, but again, should work well with any Linux distribution.

Tunnelbroker provides free IPv6 tunnels (other providers like SixXS exists, but I wont cover them here).

Start by register an account with Tunnelbroker, when that is done login and choose the option Create Regular Tunnel. The form is pretty straight forward.

IPv4 endpoint is the IP address of your virtual server.

I’ve run some tests with MTR to determine which endpoint offers the best latency, and I came up with the following. But you should probably do your own tests.

Rackspace peers directly with HE/Tunnelbroker both in US and UK, that’s why these numbers are quite good.

When this is done, go to the tunnel page and scroll down to the Example Configurations section and choose either Linux-route2 or Linux-net-tools (without knowing exactly why, I’d recommend the route2 method). Run the commands as root on your server.

Now, the IP listed under Client IPv6 address is your endpoint IPv6 address, this can be used for services. It’s also possible to allocate a /48 network, but that’s probably not necessary for a single server.

Try it out by running the following comand.

# ping6 ipv6.google.com