First, browse to Hurrican Electrics Tunnel Broker site and create an account for yourself. It's free and once registered, you can create multiple tunnels.
Select Create Regular Tunnel. You should be presented with the following form:
You will need a static IPv4 address from your ISP. If you don't have one, you can use a dynamic address, but when it changes, the tunnel will drop. Hurricane Electric will use this address as part of the bits to make up your new IPv6 block. For my address, I use 74.93.0.52.
Next, choose the closest tunnel server to your network. In this case, the network uses Los Angeles, CA, but you can select any location you believe would give you the best response for your IPv6 traffic. Remember: All of your IPv6 traffic will first go to that location and then be transmitted to your static address so short paths are a good thing.
When complete, press Submit. You will now see a screen similar to the one below:
Congratulations! You now have a full IPv6 network. From the form above, we can see that:
- You have an IPv6 point-to-point link from 2001:470:c:60c::2 at your end to 2001:470:c:60c::1 at Hurricane Electric.
- You own (sort of) the entire network 2001:470:d:60c/64. Or, to put it another way, you own 65,536 subnets, each of which is 48 bits worth of address space.
This is your network, as if you were allocated static IPs. However, you might notice a few odd things:
- Address spaces are separated by colons -- and are really big.
- If you don't see a zero in the address, it's implied. Thus 2001:470:d:60c/64 can also be written as 2001:0470:000d:060c::/64. And to be absolutely correct, the full address 2001:0470:000d:060c:0000:0000:0000:0000
- Like IPv4, the / indicates a subnet. You may have seen /24 to mean use 24 bits for the network mask, but in this case, /64 means use the first 64 bits.
That leaves you with the 64 bits beyond the address block. Here IPv6 has a nice trick. Remember that Ethernet addresses are 48 bits long and they are globally unique. No two ethernet MAC addresses (which just happen to be 48 bits long) will ever match. That means one could write:
- 2001:0470:000d:060c:XXXX:48 bit Ethernet Address
What does one do with XXXX? Think of it has your own 65,536 subnet block. So you can have 65,536 blocks of network space, each of which can hold the entire space of Ethernet -- and they autoconfigure!