Slashdot Mirror

I noticed it too. Abovetopsecret had this station information link posted which has a Google Maps thingy embedded. Mostly black when you zoom in, some faint borders can be seen though.

..is that I'm going to have to re-purchase all the networking equipment that companies are going to refuse to update. That being said, I'm already using IPv6 tunneled through Hurricane Electric and Freenet6. What's nice is the automatic DNS identification and the swimming turtle. Oh, and the price.

I would also love a block of live IPv6 addresses for my home. I currently have an old P200 doing NAT for the network, and it's bloody great. I run Smoothwall linux on it, which is designed to be run on machines acting as a firewall/router.

Do any similar distros do this for IPv6?
Is it easy to migrate an IPv4 NAT network like mine to IPv6 (assuming all the clients are IPv6-capable)?
Oh, and what do people mean by "/48"?

Have any people successfully set up something like this, maybe using services like freenet6?

Thanks people.

You can have a whole octet to yourself right now. That's a lot of IP addresses and you're ISP doesn't have to support IPv6, it can be encapsulated in IPv4. There are plenty of gateways out there that will translate the request for you so that only your router will need both IPv4 and IPv6.

My home network computers have all been talking routable ipv6 natively for yonks, even though my internet link is a single ip4. - My router (running freebsd) uses the freenet software/gateway at freenet-6, and my home machines are simply configured with ip6 'normally' with no specifics relating to the fact the ip6 is tunneled.

NAT is difficult if you have two hosts behind two NAT gateways on two seperate networks and you want them talk to each other.

Set a tunnel. (Encrypt it even.) Use port forwarding on high ports. Use one of the many vpn solutions available. Use a proxy firewall. Multi-home your firewall if necessary

Just don't front a machine onto the internet unless you absolutely have to.

NAT is unnecessary and a pain.

NAT is usefull and rather easy. How much could your ISP be charging for an additional IP anyway? $5.00? $7.00? That much! In order to save a few bucks, you're gonna front each and every machine you have onto routable addresses. Great Idea! 'Cause we all know that every machine in the universe needs to be accessable.

BTW, here's a link you might be interested in:

Freenet6.

Get whatever IPv6 software you need for your OS, and install Freenet6 on your gateway. Start using it now, don't bother waiting for your ISP to catch up. Works fine, but if you're behind a firewall... Let's not get into that one again.

Here's one place you can go to prove you're wrong.

I've been using freenet6 for a bout a year now. I've never had any problems with it, and I get a /48 for free, so I've been able to experiment with IPv6 on various machines on my network (FreeBSD, Linux, Solaris, AIX, and XP).

I haven't written any IPv6 apps yet -- still need to read/buy a good programming guide.

Your best bet to get started is to sign up with one of the free IPv6 tunnel broker services (such as Hurricane Electric or Freenet6), which will allow you to get a boatload of addresses for your own use, as well as provide you with a tunnel to use them through. These services can provide you with over a BILLION publicly addressable IPv6 addresses for free.

The next step is to configure your home router/firewall box as a dual-stack machine, following the howtos for your particular OS. The one for Gentoo Linux is extremely straightforward, based on my experience with it a few nights ago.

The last step is to migrate the rest of your internal machines over to IPv6-only. They will use your dual-stack router for connections to IPv4-only sites (similar to the NAT you're probably already using).

The only real downside to this is that your IPv6-only machines will only be directly addressable from other IPv6 machines. You'd have to wait for your ISP to support IPv6 before you can get a fully IPv6 pipe, but upgrading your internal network now-ish sounds like a pretty good idea to me.

NOTE--If you're stuck behind a NAT box that you don't control, you'll have LOTS of problems getting a tunnel to work. If you figure out how to do it, please let me know; I failed miserably at this... :)

Sorry if this is OT, but it's hard finding discussion on this. Is anyone here using an IPv6 tunnel broker that can successfully IRC and listen to the mp3 streams in the previous Slashdot story? I've tried Hurrican Electric and freenet6 with no luck. I'm using XP SP1.

IPv6 isn't all about greater address space. It also brings improvements on routing and network autoconfiguration. The packets can also be classified into different categories, etc.

Enable your box with IPv6 today, Freenet6 provides free IPv6 connectivity over IPv4. Get some IPv6-enabled apps and use some IPv6-enabled servers/services, FTP and IRC being among the available ones.

It is definitely a good thing, but the US isn't going to shift to IPv6 just because one government department has decided to use it. It will happen by people getting involved with IPv6. Jump on the 6-bone today.

www.freenet6.net, it's free.

Use http://www.freenet6.net to get yourself a free tunneling link to the 6bone. They'll also give you a /48 subnet if you tweak a few bits.
Plenty of clients available too. In Debian, simply apt-get it from your closest mirror ;-)

What exactly does it take to 'have' IPv6? What stuff neds to be upgraded? Application software? OS? Router? Does your ISP need to 'have' or 'support' it?

OS and applications. Many operating systems already do support IPv6, as do many applications (Mozilla does, at least, as does many IRC clients because there's distinct benefits.)

Router/ISP level support is Nice To Have, but there are tunneling servers that enable IPv4 sites to talk IPv6.

As far as setup woes go, my setup was as easy as 'apt-get install freenet6' =)

I use IPv6 with a free service, freenet6.net, and my linux with ipv6 support. You can read the directions in that web.

Use a tunnel broker. It lets you tunnel ipv6 connections over ipv4 to another endpoint. Two of the most popular are Freenet6 and Hurricane Electric. Hurricane Electric requires a static ipv4 IP, but Freenet6 works with dynamic IPs.

We're already out of addresses - why add more in wireless space? IPv6 has many features that allow for efficient autodiscovery of other nodes, transition mechanisms to move easily from IPv4, multicasting capabilities, etc.

Let's drop this 192.168.x.x and 10.x.x.x stuff and just give everybody their own address. Multiple addresses can easily be used on a single interface as well.

Just something to think about when you want to design something yourself. If you don't want it to make itself extinct in the next few years, think about integrating IPv6 at the outset. It _is_ widespread technology just waiting to happen.

Links:

IPv6.org
hs247.com
freenet6.net
6bone.net

For more reasons on why IPv6 is so cool, and some of the neat things it can do (especially in the field of mesh-wireless, check out some of the technical details here.

If you take a look at www.internet2.edu you'll see that they've just (as of August 5) announced native support for IPv6. That certainly is cool, as it's a major step towards getting IPv6 some more mainstream use. Provided that the sites on I2 have the ability to route IPv6, this means that users at the sites will be able to get real IPv6 connectivity to other I2 sites without tunneling. Way cool.

(Of course, anybody can get IPv6 Internet access using tunnels. See freenet6.net and some 6-to-4 information.)

But I2 still isn't the 6bone. ;^)

noah

Oh, and it is an honor to have the one-and-only Wakko Warner reply to my original post. An honor indeed.

If you are interested in playing with IPv6, try to get a tunnel via www.freenet6.net.

They're supporting devices running *BSD, Linux, Win*, Solaris, HP-UX and Cisco IOS.

Get a free IPv6 tunnel from Freenet6 or Hurricane Electric.

Supposedly IPv6 will have enough addresses to give one to each of the angels dancing on the head of the proverbial pin. Can't wait.

I've got my block of 2^64 addresses...

You can get one here, of course :-)

just fill in the nice form and it's yours.

Check out: 6bone . And here's a way to get on 6bone from your workstation: Freenet6

sit1 Link encap:IPv6-in-IPv4
inet6 addr: 3ffe:1200:3028:817d:dead:dead:dead:dead/127 Scope:Global
inet6 addr: 3ffe:1200:3028:ff01::2fb/127 Scope:Global
UP POINTOPOINT RUNNING NOARP MTU:1480 Metric:1
RX packets:166 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:156 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen:0
RX bytes:22433 (21.9 Kb) TX bytes:18211 (17.7 Kb)

Everyone is saying "We must have ipv6 before we should worry about games". The truth is that you can set yourself up with ipv6 right now! So stop talking and start doing. you can get directions here.

As all the OSs have a different way of setting up ip6 over ip4. You probably won't find a usefull generic how-to. There was I site I found in the past that had howto's for many OSs. I can't find the exact link, but start looking at www.freenet6.net.

For Linux specific try Linux: IPv6

download MSR's IPv6 kit for Win2K

install

connect to 6Bone via Freenet6

install critical applications to test IPv6, like Quake

Enjoy!

Implementation data for other OS's is here.

*scoove*

I had MS Research's IPv6 implementation running for a while on my sacrificial Windows box as part of some v6 experiments earlier this year. While it was still a little bare-bones, it was pretty easy to get running and seemed to play fine with my other v6 machines (BSDs of a couple of flavours using KAME's implementation).
Naturally, there are few immediate practical advantages as it's still in the research stage and deployment is thin on the ground - v6 is only just beginning the transition from research project to production use, but it's there, and it's just about ready to go.
As most v6 internetworking links (currently, primarily as part of the 6bone) are still tunnelled over IPv4, you shouldn't have any problem running v6 over an existing v4 connection if you want to experiment. Home users would probably be best served by checking out Freenet6.
People have all the usual services running in v6 mode over the 6bone, although for me most of the fun is getting packets from point A to point B in the first place..

First we need the distribution providers to start turning on IPv6 support. I've managed to setup a RedHat box to do IPv6, but it required redoing the kernel, manually patching a couple of packages, and replaing quite a few other packages. Your average user just isn't ready for this yet.

Let me throw a few links at anyone who wants to try setting up IPv6 on their box. Be careful, you can really foul up a machine doing this wrong.

• http://www.bieringer. de/linux/IPv6/IPv6-HOWTO/IPv6-HOWTO.html - Linux IPv6 Howto document
• http://v6rpm.jindai.net/ - IPv6 RPM pacakges
• http://www.v6.linux.or.jp/develop.html - IPv6 Linux user group
• http://www.freenet6.net/ - User configured IPv6 tunnels

Instead of doing a IPv6 use day, we need an IPv6 lobbying day. Get your distribution provider to compile IPv6 support in to the default kernel (at least as a module), and start including the IPv6 packages and scripts with their installation.

FreeBSD 4.0 has IPV6 support right out of the box (or FTP install, whatever the case may be). In fact, if you goto www.freenet6.net you can hook yourself up with an IPV6 tunnel and start playing around with it immediately.

It seems I remember something about either address allocation having to be free, or the actual transit over the network...I'm not sure which, and I can't find any information on it right now, but I thought either way, it'd be of particular interest with regards to (and possibly opposition of) your idea of micropayments for bandwidth and such.

I'll try to find out some more info on this; anyone know much else about it?

I do, however, know for a fact that you're quite a bit more than wrong about the lack of services over the IPv6 network. They are plentiful, for the users and developers using the current testbed (aka the 6bone). DHIS is one of many free providers of IPv6 testing address allocation, Freenet6 is another. And there are numerous IPv6 capable sites, including FreeBSD's site, portions of Microsoft's site, NASA...

If you check out the main IPv6 sites, such as the 6bone, IPv6.org, IPv6Forum, and a whole lot of others, you'll find the network is quite extensive. Work is being done quite a bit, and it's more than just talk.

If you are looking to test a single IPv6 host, consider using FreeNet6 at www.freenet6.net. This site uses an automated web form to request and setup an IPv6 tunnel out to the mbone. The one drawback with this site is that you can't route hosts from behind this address. It is an end station address rather than a subnet. Anyway, it is still a great way to get your feet wet.

Let me pass along two links.

The first, http://www.bieringer. de/linux/IPv6/IPv6-HOWTO/IPv6-HOWTO.html, contains detailed instructions for updating a Linux system to IPv6.

The second, http://www.freenet6.net/, is an automated service for getting a tunnel to the 6Bone. This is an end station address (can't be used for a router), but it lets you test the client applications for talking to anywhere on the 6Bone.

--dkm