According to these statistics, in April 2016 approximately only 10% of users reached Google servers through IPv6. This shows that IPv6 adoption is steadily increasing, but still quite low despite the good support available in the network infrastructure and all operating systems.

For users who would like to try IPv6 but are stuck with IPv4 due to lack of support from their ISPs, there are free tunnel broker services, which, as explained in RFC 3053, are “virtual IPv6 ISPs, providing IPv6 connectivity to users already connected to the IPv4 Internet”. “Tunnel” refers to the fact that IPv6 packets from the host are encapsulated in IPv4 packets to reach the broker through the internet (and vice-versa). One of the most used tunnel brokers is Hurricane Electric, which is also the one I’ve used in this post; but the setup should be quite the same for every other provider.

NetworkManager 1.2 supports the creation of a broad range of software devices including VXLANs, MAC-VLANS/MAC-VTAPs, TUN/TAP and, of course, IP tunnels. After registering on the provider website and creating a new tunnel instance, the NetworkManager command line utility (nmcli) can be used to create a new tunnel in the following way:

NetworkManager 1.2 was recently released after more than a year of development and is available in major distributions including Fedora 24 and Ubuntu 16.04. In this post I will briefly talk about the features NetworkManager offers to users for configuring DNS on their machines, and how this has improved in the last release.