[clug] IPv6

Arjen Lentz arjen at lentz.com.au
Thu Jan 6 15:20:15 MST 2011


Hi Brett

----- Original Message -----
> With the renewed interest in IPv6 I was wondering what other people
> were doing about using it. I can summarise what I've done so far. Nothing.
> 
> Is there anybody out there who is using it?
> 
> I've heard that some ISPs have facilities for accessing IPv6 but these
> mostly seem like a
> gateway back to IPv4. So once the config is done do you actually talk
> to anyone else
> using v6 or does it all end up back on v4 somewhere on the way. It
> would be good to know
> how we're going to get from here to there. Right now it seems very
> hard. Can anyone
> recommend some reading for migration strategies?

Internode has dualstack and of course a native IPv6 connection to the rest of the world.
I use a Cisco ADSL router (Cisco 870 series) bought off eBay as that was a simple, pretty cheap ($250 or so) yet effective way of getting proper IPv6 support in a small router.

If you happen to have an Apple router (airport, time capsule, etc) it can do IPv6 perfectly, including the PPP link to ISP or even a tunnel. So with one of those, all you need is a dumb ADSL modem in bridge mode and the Apple router can do the rest.

By the way, some consumer routers now support IPv6 but most go on the "no consumer is asking for it" line which is rather silly, considering the issue.

So my home/office speaks IPv6 and I use the "ShowIP" plugin in Firefox to see where it a page actually comes from and yes I do see a fair bit of IPv6.

Our hosted servers elsewhere have 6to4 so they are IPv6 capable even when the datacenter where they're hosted does not yet. We've found this to work better than tunnels which introduce a lot of lag (latency) and actually also reliability issues.

I'd recommend against running IPv6 over a tunnel or other magic through a consumer IPv4 router/modem connection, as the link tends to barf... in theory the protocol 41 trickery should go straight through, but in practice the consumer device running the PPP connection tends to get upset so that destabilises everything. Best to invest as above at this stage, lead the way for some others. I note quite a lot of interest, including from laptop visitors to my house who find that they magically get IPv6 ;-)

Cheers,
Arjen.
-- 
Arjen Lentz, Exec.Director @ Open Query (http://openquery.com)
Remote expertise & maintenance for MySQL/MariaDB server environments.

Follow us at http://openquery.com/blog/ & http://twitter.com/openquery



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