Speaking of Standards

Do you want to get your home network set up with globally routable IPv6 addresses? If you have an Apple WiFi base station, I previously explained the easy instructions for how to configure IPv6 using an Apple AirPort or Time Capsule. However, ever since I wrote that, I’ve had people ask me…

What if I don’t have an Apple base station? How can I get IPv6 via Tunnelbroker.net?

The answer is that yes, you most certainly can get IPv6 from Tunnelbroker.net.

The initial steps are basically identical to what I wrote in the other post..

1. Register with Tunnelbroker.net

Head over to Tunnelbroker.net and register for a free account if you don’t already have one:

2. Create a new IPv6 tunnel

Once you are logged in, you click on “Create Regular Tunnel”, which will bring you to this page: (I already have created 1 of the 5 tunnels you can create with a free account, so my screen may be different from what you see)

All you really need to do here is copy/paste the IP address you are viewing from into the “IPv4 endpoint” box on the form:

You also need to choose which of the Tunnelbroker servers are nearest to you, but odds are you can just take their recommendation. After entering the IP address and server selection, just hit “Submit” and you’ll have your IPv6-to-IPv4 tunnel all set up on the Tunnelbroker side. Click on the “Tunnel Details” link on the confirmation page and you should see a page like this:

Now you are ready to configure your home network to use IPv6…

3. Obtain the instructions for your operating system

This next part is going to be different for each of you depending upon what operating system you are using and even what device you are connecting the tunnel to. If you are just connecting a single computer inside of your home network, you can just perform the operations here from that one computer. If you are going to going to connect from whatever router or gateway you have on the edge of your network and then do routing for the devices on the inside of the network… well… you may or may not have to do a bit more work.

Regardless, the folks at Hurricane Electric provide this nice, handy drop-down menu at the bottom of your list of tunnels:

Choose an option and you’ll see what you need to do. For instance, here was one set of Linux instructions for one of my tunnels:

With those instructions you should be able to get up and going with IPv6. If the instructions don’t work for you, I’ve found the Tunnelbroker forums to be a great resource as well.

Two Critical Caveats

As I wrote about in the earlier article in more detail, there are two important things to think about with using this setup:

1. Tunnelbroker.net relies on a static IPv4 address on your end

2. Do think about security – you have a live, PUBLIC IPv6 address

Please refer to my earlier article for more details, but these are critical issues to be aware of when setting up your home network.

In The End…

If you’ve done all of this, you should now have IPv6 connectivity on your home network (or single machine). A simple test is to try out these sites:

• http://www.ipv6-test.com/ – will give you a full report on your IPv6 and IPv4 connections
• http://www.kame.net/ – the turtle will dance if you have IPv6, and will be still if you don’t.

If you have IPv6 working, you can then go check out Google, Facebook, Netflix, CNN or any of the many other sites now offering IPv6 connectivity.

Enjoy!

Recently we came across a great series of articles at InformIT on the subject of VoiceXML. Written by Frank Coyne, they cover the range from an introduction to VoiceXML up through using VoiceXML with social networks. Nicely, the author mentions Voxeo and talks about how the exercises he lays out can be done using a free developer account on our evolution.voxeo.com site. Here are the articles:

• “An Introduction to VoiceXML“
• “Part 2: Working with Forms“
• “Part 3: VoiceXML Grammars“
• “Part 4: Grammars, Scope and Event Handlers“
• “Part 5: VoiceXML meets Web 2.0“

You can also get a list of all the articles as well as a blog entry from Frank Coyne back in August titled “Mashin’ Up with Voice XML“. To probably no one’s surprise, I was personally most intrigued by Part 5. Having done a ton of work with XSLT stylesheets in the past I enjoyed the part about creating dynamic Voice XML using XSLT stylesheets to generate the VoiceXML:

http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=1017851&seqNum=6

Linking VoiceXML to triggering Gmail delivery is also quite cool:

http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=1017851&seqNum=8

As I am personally just coming up to speed on VoiceXML, I’ll be working through many of these tutorials in my own evolution account. (Since accounts are free, you are welcome to sign up and check it out yourself.)

Technorati Tags: voicexml, tutorial, voxeo