As some of you may know, I've been playing around with IPv6 quite a bit lately. One specific IPv6 technology which has gotten me quite excited is the Teredo automatic tunneling protocol. Teredo allows you to obtain a globally routable IPv6 address when you only have access to the IPv4 internet, even if you are behind a NAT router¹!

Support for the Teredo protocol is actually in WindowsXP, but it is disabled by default. However, that has changed for Windows Vista—where IPv6 and Teredo are enabled by default². This is important because this means that relatively soon, widespread deployment of IPv6 will become a reality. This is great for Windows users, but what about other platforms?

Miredo is an open-source (GPL) user-space teredo implementation for linux and BSD. Someone went thru the effort to get miredo to work on MacOS X, but setting it up is not something your average joe can accomplish. What is needed is an installer package.

Well, that's exactly what I'm putting together. I'm releasing a prerelease version of the package today for early-adopters and power-users. You just download it, install it, and you should have IPv6 connectivity. It's that simple!

Prerelease 2

Download Here: Miredo Installer for MacOS X (Universal), and source code

IMPORTANT: This package is a prerelease version intended for early adopters, and is NOT intended for widespread deployment. If you decide to install and use this experimental package, you should subscribe to the miredo mailing list, paying serious attention to any security advisories.

If you want to uninstall, execute the uninstall-miredo.command script, located in the /Applications/Utilities folder.

Operating System Compatibility

This release will work fine with MacOS X 10.4 (Tiger) and MacOS X 10.5 (Leopard). It will also work with MacOS X 10.6 (SnowLeopard) as long as you are using the 32-bit kernel (very few people are using the 64-bit kernel at the moment, chances are you are using the 32-bit kernel). You will need to reinstall miredo-osx after upgrading to SnowLeopard.

Do not try to install this package on any earlier version of MacOS X!

Source Repository

A subversion repository is available here. The latest "stable" tag is probably what you want. UPDATE: I've moved the miredo-osx repository over to Github.

Special thanks to Mattias Nissler for his work on the MacOS X TUN/TAP Driver, which is included in this package and used by miredo.

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1. However, teredo will not work behind a symmetric type of NAT. In that case your only option is setting up some sort of manual tunnel.
2. This is half-true. From the Microsoft Teredo page:

   In Windows Vista, the Teredo component is enabled but inactive by default. In order to become active, a user must either install an application that needs to use Teredo, or configure advanced Windows Firewall filter settings to allow edge traversal.