IPv4 pool exhaustion and IPv6

I've seen some stories popping up recently showing what has been known for a long time, Ipv4 is close to out of allocatable space. You can view some reports at this site. With larger companies (like Yahoo!) and the US government pushing towards IPv6, this will be an important skill to have for IT workers. For those with limited exposure, its time to pick up a book and do some playing around. A while back, I was doing this and ran across Hurricane Electric. They are doing a good job of helping with IPv6 technology, and are giving people a chance to place around with some free services. They have a multi-level free certification program for IPv6, which requires hands on real world IPv6 work. The tunneling provides set up instructions for multiple operating systems (including windows). I have been playing with this in the last few days, setting up v6 tunnels, v6 capable web and mail servers, along with DNS. They do have some free dns capability, but for the tests, you need domain names registered elsewhere. Co.cc is good for this as they give free domain registrations in their space. The only problem is they don't let you create AAAA records on their servers. You can however register a domain, and delegate it to ns1.he.net (where you use HE's freedns system to create these records). Another issue that may come up for some users is the ability to allow this type of traffic through a home connection. IP type 41 needs to be allowed, so your home router needs to be able to do more than just TCP/UDP forwarding. If you can get your router to mirror its public IP to a backend machine, its no issue.