IPv6 Enabled

Epiphyte.ca is now fully IPv6 enabled. Let me know if you experience any problems accessing the site or sending e-mail. I got tired of waiting for my old hosting provider to support IPv6, so I moved the web and mail servers to an Amazon EC2 micro instance (free for a year, and then ~$10/month+bandwidth/storage use), and the DNS server to Hurricane Electric's free dual-stack DNS hosting service. The IPv6 connection is courtesy of HE's free tunnel broker service, since EC2 does not natively support IPv6 (although Amazon's load balancing service does provide an IPv6 address). As part of this process, I also completed HE's IPv6 certification to the maximum “Sage” level.

I've had my home computer IPv6 enabled via HE's tunnel broker for around a year, and since I got an IPv6-capable router (an Airport Extreme) my whole home network is enabled. I haven't noticed any trouble accessing any sites since then, and it pleases me that every time I view a YouTube video, I'm contributing a reasonable amount to the IPv6 usage stats since HE tunnel users are opted into Google over IPv6. It's really cool being able to access computers within my home network directly from outside the network since every device gets its very own publicly routable IPv6 address even though the network has to share a single IPv4 address through network address translation. SSHing directly into my home computer from my EC2 instance without any of that annoying NAT port mapping somehow reminds me of when I first connected my computer directly to the Internet using SLIP after years of terminal-only access. Makes me feel like a full Internet citizen again (it's not really the Internet if devices can't connect peer-to-peer). I can't wait for IPv6 to work everywhere, and there's no reason anyone should wait when HE makes it so easy no matter how lazy your ISP is.