IPv6 for home users

Since very few ISPs provide native IPv6 connectivity to home users you will have to set up tunnel to an IPv6 network. You'll need to find a tunnel broker that provides v6 connectivity (here's a list); unfortunately the tunnel will reduce the efficiency of v6 connections (due to the overhead of encapsulation and added latency); on the bright side the tunnel can seamlessly traverse a NAT.

If you have a Linux machine at home then you can get yourself a delegation for an entire network - usually a /56, for up to 256 unique addresses - and use radvd to advertise it to your entire LAN: all you home machines are autoconfigured, the linux machine acts as a router to IPv6 packets.

Vista, Windows Server 2008 and Windows 7 all use IPv6 by default. But the network appliances (switch/hub/wlan ap's) have to support IPv6 as well. First make sure all your internal equipment is IPv6 compliant.

Next is to make sure your router is IPv6 complient.

Finally you have to wait for you ISP to implement IPv6. As long as you are not given an external IPv6 address by your ISP you are bound to IPv4 when using the internet. The local machines will still communicate with IPv6 though.

You can use "ping machine -6" or "ping6 machine" to force pinging with IPv6.