I just figured out a really simple and obvious way to access Gmail and Google Reader over IPv6 that doesn’t require the use of hacky portals such as IPv6Gate.
Google already offers their search engine service via IPv6 at ipv6.google.com. This works fine, although it doesn’t work with Gmail or Google Reader, as for some reason, they have not added those services to the ipv6.google.com domain — they only work if you are on the www.google.com domain.
However, there is a way to access Google’s IPv6 server and still retain the www.google.com domain: edit your /etc/hosts file.
To access Gmail and Google Reader via IPv6, add the following line to your /etc/hosts file (if you are on Windows, add it to your C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts file):
2001:4860:c003::68 www.google.com mail.google.com
If you are using Firefox, you will need to restart your browser before it picks up the changes (as it uses an internal DNS cache).
You can add support for other services such as Google Images by adding the respective domain names to the end of that line. However, adding Google Maps gets a little tricky, as the map images are served off several different servers. In the comments below, Jari K gives us an /etc/hosts line that adds the map image servers, which apparently works.
Please note that the above IPv6 address may have changed since I wrote this post. To find out the most current IPv6 address that Google uses, use the following command:
dig +short aaaa ipv6.google.com
If the IPv6 address that you get from that command is different from the one I posted above, please let me know in the comments!
I wonder what the likelihood of Google adding AAAA records to the main www.google.com domain is.
[...] your ISP isn’t helping you then you can have a look at this article discribing how to tweak your system to do Google in IPv6 [...]
The IPv6 above seems to outdated.
Here is what i got:
dig +short aaaa ipv6.google.com
ipv6.l.google.com.
2001:4860:0:1001::68
Thanks for the info. Interestingly, ipv6.google.com still resolves to what I wrote in the blog post for me. Perhaps it’s a regional thing.
Also, your test pages don’t seem to work. (The DNS doesn’t seem to work.) Other IPv6 sites definitely work for me, still.
The site http://fathi.eu.org/ is accessible only over IPv6, it doesn’t contain any data, just a test page for those whom are interrested.
The site http://amine.fathi.eu.org/ contains real data updated regularly (my son’s photo album) and is also only accessible through IPv6.
The problem for the deployement of IPv6 in some countries like tunisia is it won’t be deployed until internet authorities (read internet censorities) got all the tools and knowledge to block access to the outside IPv6 world i.e. mail, unwanted political content , …
Hi,
here’s what I defined in /etc/hosts to access Google maps over v6 (all on one line, of course):
2001:4860:0:1001::68 maps.google.com mt.google.com mt0.google.com mt1.google.com mt2.google.com mt3.google.com cbk0.google.com cbk1.google.com cbk2.google.com cbk3.google.com mw1.google.com mw2.google.com khm.google.com khm0.google.com khm1.google.com khm2.google.com khm3.google.com
As you can see, the address is 2001:4860:0:1001::68 for me.
- Jari
WRT “I wonder what the likelihood of Google adding AAAA records to the main http://www.google.com domain is.” … the odds are very good if you are a member of their “trusted tester program” …
/TJ
Or just get whitelisted and use googles DNS servers.
Or if you use http://www.tunnelbroker.net, then just use he.net’s DNS resolvers (which are google whitelisted)
Google doesn’t want to hand out AAAA records to folks using IPv4 only.
Yes, I completely agree, and that is my approach now. (I use 2001:44b8:1::6 and 2001:44b8:2::6 as my resolvers.) But you’ll notice this post was written before such resolvers were available to the public.