Using an IPv6-only internal network in a real-world environment
Note that this is a very outdated page. Have fun.
Introduction
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IPv6 is fun to play with, a challenge to use, the future, plain cool, et cetera. But all
that isn't enough to let the real-world transition from IPv4 to IPv6 go smoothly.
I expect that at some point in time, there will be ISPs providing ipv6-only
access. Before that will be possible, a few problems will have to be tackled.
I thought it'd be fun to experiment a bit with all this, and so I decided to
set myself the following challenge: to make my own internal network
IPv6-only, yet without sacrificing too much functionality.
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Current setup
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I currently own 2 computers, a server called 'mintzer' and a client laptop called
'setzer' (after Bob Mintzer and Brian Setzer).
Read more...
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Problems, and how they might be solved
1. Not all servers which are available on the IPv4 Internet have IPv6-connectivity
Step 1: allowing an IPv6-aware client application to talk to an IPv4-only host through IPv6 packets Achieved!
Schematic:
| IPv6-aware app
| ->
|
| IPv6
| | F: 3ffe:8114:2000:1160:200:e8ff:fe3a:35e4
| | T: fec0:0:0:ffff::216.239.39.101
|
| ->
| mintzer
| ->
|
| IPv4
| | F: 195.169.216.157
| | T: 216.239.39.101
|
| ->
| 216.239.39.101
|
We will try to allow a IPv6-aware program, such as lynx, on the internal network to talk to an
IPv4-only machine on the internet, such as
http://www.google.com. I got this running pretty well
using pTRTd. This means a packet to fec0:0:0:ffff::216.239.39.101, for example, would
be forwarded by mintzer to 216.239.39.101.
Read more...
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Step 2: Returning the local AAAA-record when a host only has an A-record Achieved!
Schematic:
| IPv6-aware application
| ->
|
| ->
| totd
| ->
|
| ->
| DNS-server
| | | |
| totd
| <-
|
| <-
| DNS-server
| | | |
| totd
| ->
|
| ->
| DNS-server
| | IPv6-aware application
| <-
|
google.com. IN AAAA fec0::ffff:0:0:d8ef:2364
| google.com. IN AAAA fec0::ffff:0:0:d8ef:3364
| |
| <-
| totd
| <-
|
google.com. IN A 216.239.35.100
| google.com. IN A 216.239.51.100
| |
| <-
| DNS-server
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When I type 'www.google.com' in my browser, for which there is no AAAA-record, I
want my dns to return not only 216.239.39.101 but also fec0:0:0:ffff::216.239.39.101.
Read more...
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2. Not all client applications are ipv6-aware
Since it would be quite naive to think every single network-application will support
IPv6 any time soon, we need some way to allow ipv4-only applications on setzer to talk
to IPv4-hosts on the internet (It is obvious that ipv4-only applications will probably
not be able to talk to ipv6-only hosts, though we might be able to do some dns tricks).
Read more...
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This leaves the problem of contacting ipv6-only nodes from the ipv4-only world open,
I'm not currently planning to go into this.
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