Originally submitted at O’Reilly

This essential guide explains what works, what doesn’t, and most of all, what’s practical about IPv6–the next-generation Internet standard. A must-have for network administrators everywhere looking to fix their network’s scalability and management problems. Also covers other IPv6 ben…

IPv6 Network Administration

A little outdated – needs updating

By Simon Mudd from Madrid, Spain on 8/18/2010 3out of 5

Pros: Well-written, Easy to understand

Cons: Too basic

I forgot to check the date this book was published before buying it and that was a mistake. The content was pretty good but as it was written in …

I have just returned from holiday and while it’s not normal reading during some of my spare time I managed to read a couple of books on IPv6 I’d recently bought to get me up to scratch and refresh my memory on the topic.

These books are:

• Deploying IPv6 Networks, by Cisco
• Understanding IPv6, Second Edition by Microsoft

The first book is quite good, and while a little old provided a good solid background for me on the subject. A lot of the information was not relevant to my interest in setting up a networked SOHO network but that’s not really a problem. The background was interesting.

The second book was a bit of a mistake. I’d ordered it as it was a …

As part of my IPv6 setup I wanted to check what support I could expect for my current hardware. This post relates the results I got by checking on each one.

• Linux PC – IPv6 is supported in Linux
• MacBook – IPv6 is supported in MacOS X
• Windows 7 NetBook – IPv6 is supported in Windows 7
• Draytek Vigor 2820N – Draytek support in Spain confirmed to plans to implement IPv6 on this box, but they have 1 IPv6 aware router so future models should hopefully have support.
• HP Officejet Ro L7680 Printer – this printer has a network connection. A support request on HP’s website generated an automatic message saying my printer was no longer supported.  So no chance …

In order to use IPv6 you probably need to setup things so that your sites can be reached over IPv6. I manage my own DNS server for my domain so decided to make my DNS server reachable over IPv6.  This did not sound too complicated.

This required 2 things:

• Ensure that Bind 9 was configured to receive and respond to queries on this address
• Tell my registrar about the IPv6 address of my domain

I checked my DNS software, Bind (v9), and it did not seem to be responding to DNS requests to the IPv6 address. A quick look around indicated that I had to add an extra block in the options section of named.conf

options {
 directory "/etc/named";

 // required to listen for ipv6 queries
 listen-on-v6 { any; };

....

My registrar is gkg.net and I’ve been using them for a …

When originally looking around to find out how to connect to a IPv6 network there seem to be quite a few different options and providers.

I originally requested an allocation with Hurricane Electric but had trouble setting up the tunnel. Their web page said they could not ping my public IP address (my router) and this prevented them allowing the tunnel to be created. My ADSL router does not have any ICMP filters configured and as the public IP address is forwarded to my Linux PC I knew that did not either. I also remember when setting up my ADSL connection with Jazztel that I had some configuration issues, and this turned out to be related to the fact (from what I remember) that Jazztel block ICMP traffic to the customer’s IP address.  So with this problem I looked to see if I could find another tunnel broker.

I’m currently using …

The following page http://blog.wl0.org/ipv6-setup-progress/ is going to be used to show how I make progress in setting up IPv6 and the issues I come across.

Other the last few years I’ve read quite a lot about IPv6 but not really done a lot about it. The theory is easy but when you actually look to try to set it up you suddenly find that most hardware does not really support it.

• My ISP (Jazztel) have told me they don’t provide an IPv6 service.
• My Draytek 2820n ADSL router does not support IPv6. Draytek seem to be just starting to look at this in their Vigor 2130 series, but my ADSL router is not covered.
• My Thecus N5200 Pro NAS device does run Linux underneath so it can be configured to support IPv6. I’ve recently upgraded to firmware version …

With the exhaustion of IPv4 address space looming sometime in 2012; probably earlier rather than later, it makes sense to ease on into IPv6 land.  Without straying into tunnel broking and endpoint shenanigans 6to4 is a method of wrapping up IPv6 inside of IPv4.

(note that MySQL does not currently support IPv6 itself – but what we’re discussing here is about externally facing systems, like your web/application servers)

6to4 performs three functions:

1. Allocates an IPv6 address block to any host/network that has a global IPv4 address.
2. Wraps up IPv6 packets inside IPv4 packets for transmission over IPv4 using 6in4 (traffic is sent over IPv4 inside IPv4 packets whose IP headers have the IP protocol number  set to 41; IPv6-in-IPv4. )  …

This is going to be a really short post, but for someone it could save an hour of life.

So, you’ve nothing to do and you’ve decided to play around with IPv6 or maybe you’re happened to be an administrator of a web service that needs to support IPv6 connectivity and you need to make your nginx server work nicely with this protocol.

First thing you need to do is to enable IPv6 in nginx by recompiling it with --with-ipv6 configure option and reinstalling it. If you use some pre-built package, check if your nginx already has this key enabled by running nginx -V.

The results should have --with-ipv6 option in configure arguments:

As a long-time registrar, we are aware of the importance of keeping up with the internet, as well as trying to be at the forefront of changing technologies as we have done for the past four years. Now it's time to do the same with IPv6!

As a result of this and requests from our customers coupled with the ominous depletion of IPv4 address space, I am pleased to announce that we will be offering IPv6 connectivity for our customers.  Given that IPv6 is the future of the Internet, it is perfectly logical that it is something of particular interest to us.  

This is, of course, not an overnight affair, and will take some time to be able to fully offer the service for all customers, and at the moment we expect to pass through several stages of testing before general deployment.   In any case, we hope to have IPv6 fully available for our customers before the end of the year.

What is the …