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!!! The Great Big [WLUG] Guide to [IPv6]

!! What is IPv6?

IPv6 is an [Acronym] for Version 6 of the InternetProtocol.  It is the next version from [IPv4] (technically, IPv4 was the first production version.  To paraphrase, to pick the replacement, there were four versions proposed, numbered 5 -> 8; 6 was the one that they picked.)  It is sometimes known as __IPng__ ([IP] __N__ext __G__eneration).

!! Why do I want to use it?

[IPv4], with its 32 bit address space, has 2<sup>32</sup> addresses (4,294,967,296).  While that sounds like a lot, remember that there are more people than that on the planet, and various allocation decisions seriously cut down the usefulness of those 4 billion addresses (for example, 1/256 of the space, 127/8, is reserved to refer to "My Local Machine"!  16.7 __million__ addresses for localhost!)

[IPv6] has more addresses.  How many?

!! 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456 addresses

That's 2<sup>128</sup>. That’s more than 665,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 addresses per surface square metre on Earth.  So, if you want your toaster to have a large block of [IP] addresses, you can!   See [IPv6Addressing] for some information.

It also features funky new features such as different address scopes (LinkLocal, SiteLocal, GlobalScope), AnyCast, and MultiCast (and no more BroadCast).  Site local has been recently deprecated and is to be replaced by [ULA].  [IPSec] is native to IPv6 (it's available to [IPv4] as an add-on, but is kludgy.) Read about some of the mysterious [IPv6Flags].

Unfortunately no one supports it yet.  One day....

!! IPv6 on WLUG

* If you use IPv6 to connect to this wiki, you will get an AnimatedPenguin instead of the normal [WLUG] logo in the top right corner.
* We have a couple of aliases that are useful for testing:
** www4.wlug.org.nz only has an IPv4 A record.
** www6.wlug.org.nz only has an IPv6 AAAA record.
* For information about stting up IPv6 on the MetaNet, see [MetaNetIPv6].
* See our [IPv6LessonsLearnt] for some general hints about random things we've learnt while playing with IPv6. [IPv6Errors] describes some error messages you might encounter when using IPv6 on Linux.

!! Getting IPv6

There are three methods; get a native allocation of IPv6 addresses from your Internet provider (uncommon; especially in New Zealand), get a tunnel from a tunnel broker, or use IPv6's built IPv4 compatibility.  See [IPv6Setup] and [6to4].

Read [Linux Reviews on why you want IPv6 now | http://linuxreviews.org/features/ipv6/index.html.en]. The article includes many tunnel sites to try it out now.

!! [IPv6] in the [DNS]

The average IPv6 address is represented as something like "fedc:ba98:7654:3210:fedc:ba98:7654:3210".  If you know a couple of IPv4 addresses off the top of your head, you will really want to think about making [DNS] work for you come IPv6 deployment!  Thankfully [DNS] supports IPv6 addresses; there are two types of ResourceRecord, <tt>AAAA</tt> and <tt>A6</tt>.  See [AAAAvsA6] for details about the differences.

If you want to do reverse lookups (that is, find the name if you already have an address), make sure your <tt>host</tt> command supports IPv6. On DebianLinux, install the <tt>bind9-host</tt> package instead of the old <tt>host</tt> package. For [Gentoo], install <tt>net-dns/bind-tools</tt> instead of the <tt>net-misc/host</tt> port.

See Also:
[IPv6Notes]

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CategoryNetworking
Last edited on Tuesday, May 29, 2007 2:30:18 pm by "DeanEvans"
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