Our ISP has been saying that they will be rolling out a trial of IPv6 for more than 3 years now. Since this does not appear to be forthcoming I decided instead to make use of an IPv6 tunnel.

This tunnel behaves in much the same way as a VPN tunnel. You use IPv4 to connect to an endpoint, then use IPv6 addresses on the tunnel virtual interfaces. I used the Hurricane Electric tunnelbroker.net for my home IPv6 access, and a sixxs.net AYIYA tunnel for my laptop when away from home. I chose the AYIYA for my laptop since it is NAT friendly and is a better choice if your IPv4 address changes regularly. Both services are free.

Since I have a simple Linux machine as my main router this was actually a straightforward process. If you have a router that supports IPv6 tunnels, this can be even easier. In my case I had to setup the tunnel interface in /etc/network/interfaces (this is a Debian install, this should be the same for Ubuntu). The actual IPs have been obfuscated):