A while ago I deployed IPv6 to my flat and have been having fun learning and experimenting with the new addressing methods – at some stage I’m sure I’ll write a few bits up, but there’s mountains of information about IPv6 around already – sometimes the problem is that there is *too* much information.
Thanks to the efforts of my employer and colocation provider, my publicly reachable server now has a /56 IPv6 range which I have just started assigning to various VMs and services. :-D
My first step has been to enable the webserver hosting jethrocarr.com with IPv6 – and as of today, you can now reach this site via IPv4 or IPv6. :-)
[jethro@snagglepuff ~]$ host www.jethrocarr.com www.jethrocarr.com has address 202.170.163.203 www.jethrocarr.com has IPv6 address 2407:1000:1003:1:216:3eff:fe49:df4e [jethro@snagglepuff ~]$
If you’re unsure whether you’re reaching via IPv6, try accessing ipv6.jethrocarr.com to check – if it works, you are :-D
[jethro@snagglepuff ~]$ host ipv6.jethrocarr.com ipv6.jethrocarr.com has IPv6 address 2407:1000:1003:1:216:3eff:fe49:df4e [jethro@snagglepuff ~]$
Next steps will be to setup mail, XMPP and all other sites and services with dual stack IPv4 and IPv6 for my production servers, I’m sure I’ll post again once complete so that you can all start hammering my services and breaking things. ;-)
Once production is sorted, my following tasks will be replacing the Hurricane Electric tunnel at my flat, with another tunnel to my colocation server, since it means reduced latency for all my IPv6 browsing.
I started off my IPv6 learning with the services provided by Hurricane Electric who provide not only a free IPv4 to IPv6 tunnel service, but also an automated online test platform to check your configuration and test access to your systems.
This has enabled my flat to connect to any IPv6 only resources and the few sites that have IP6 available in production services, but isn’t the greatest since it means all my traffic goes out to the US, adding considerable latency.
(I understand there is now a more local gateway in NZ, provided by SixXS which is also an option, but I figure setting up a 6to4 tunnel at both ends to be an interesting learning curve).
The other thing I want to do, is have a play with NAT64 – allowing a pure IPv6 only network to communicate with a legacy IPv4 network.
Whilst ideally we can just dual stack, it’s possible that there may be situations in future where this is not feasible – thus, something worth playing with. :-)