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You've heard a lot of talk about IPv6, and you'd like to have a play with it, but your ISP doesn't offer it. This article discusses one option, 6to4, that you can use.
If your running Windows XP SP1 or better then you can install IPv6 by just going "ipv6 install" from the command line. Apart from that, you're pretty much finished. IPv6 will auto configure itself. How easy is that!
What happens is your machine gets something called a LINK-LOCAL address, which is based off your MAC address, so is pretty much guaranteed to be unique. Next it gets a global routing prefix from your router (which is like a public IP address) and uses its MAC address again to form a globally unique address for your machine. Your machine uses ICMP to find a default gateway. And the DNS servers used for your existing IPv4 config will work just fine. Because every machine on the planet and beside can have a global IPv6 address, we should pretty much see the death of NAT.
6to4 is a tunneling option that allows IPv6 hosts to talk to other IPv6 hosts over an IPv4 network (aka, the Internet). The great thing about 6to4 is that you can establish a 6to4 tunnel without applying or getting approval from anyone. The only thing you need is a static IP address. And as a bonus, you automatically get a chunk of IPv6 address space to use (in fact, you get a /48, which is enough to create 65536 subnets - or a pretty big network for a home user).
6to4 address are formed by appending your IPv4 address in hex format to 2003. For example, 2003:<high two octets of IPv4 address>:<low two octets of IPv4 address>::/48. The next sixteen bits are for subnetworking (so you can allocate your own subnets), and the remaining 64 bits are for host addresses (which are usually based on your MAC address).
To talk to another 6to4 address your router extracts out the IPv4 address from the IPv6 address, encapsulates the orignal IPv6 packet in a new IPv4 packet, and then forwards the new IPv4 packet. The remote end then unencapsulates it. The effect of this is that the IPv6 packet takes the same route as an IPv4 packet getting to the new IPv6 host. With the poor levels of native IPv6 connectivity at the moment, this helps create more efficient IPv6 paths.
The next problem you will run into is that you need something called a 6to4 relay server to be able to reach the rest of the ipv6 world. These box's simply run dual IP stacks so they can talk to both the IPv4 and IPv6 worlds. In an ideal world, your ISP should provide these. Alas, many ISPs are not IPv6 enabled, so you end up having to use a public 6to4 relay. This becomes your IPv6 default route.
A local IPv6 site in New Zealand is www.wlug.org.nz. If your using Windows XP you should be able to "ping6 www.wlug.org.nz".
Try browsing to this IPv6 only WWW site at Microsoft Research Labs. You can not view this site if you only have IPv4, or if you don't have IPv6 routing set up properly.
If you have a Cisco DSL router IFM has provided a config wizard for writing the configuration script for you. This can be accessed from here.