General

Yesterday and today, I configured my internal network to be IPv6-capable. First, I got an IPv6 tunnel via freenet6.net, which I can really recommend: I've tried out several IPv6 tunnel providers, and failed with all of them, but freenet6 was really easy to configure. It even provides integration with the radvd, the router advertisment daemon. Router advertisment is a nice feature of IPv6 where the router advertises its own services of providing a default route for IPv6 packets. The client can take an address on its own, it already knows the router, so it's basically auto configuration.



After installing the IPv6 tunnel, I first checked the other computers whether they had auto-configured themselves for IPv6. The iBook running Mac OS X did so, and worked flawlessly immediately. My Linux-based file/mail/newsserver still needed an IPv6-capable kernel, but after recompiling one, it worked flawlessly, too.



The next thing was to make sshd IPv6-capable. The sshd on Mac OS X already was IPv6-ready, but not the ancient OpenSSH 3.4p1 from Debian Woody that is running on both my gateway and the file/mail/newsserver. And getting sshd is a bit tricky: the comments in the configuration file pretend that the installed sshd was actually supporting IPv6, but when enabling :: as ListenAddress and restarting sshd, it was complaining about unsupported protocols. The solution is to modify the Debian package: remove the --with-ipv4-default from the debian/rules file and rebuild the package, then install it and set ListenAddress :: as the only ListenAddress directive in the /etc/ssh/sshd_config configuration file. Then connections both via IPv4 and IPv6 work.



What I still need to find out is how Safari can be forced to prefer IPv6 to IPv4 if available. So, I hope to find that out ASAP, so that I can see the dancing turtle on www.kame.net. But using w3m, I already got the page saying that I was connecting via IPv6. But w3m is not really capable of displaying animated GIF files.



Of course, many of you may ask yourself "why the heck does this guy configure IPv6 although virtually nobody has this deployed so far?". Well the reason is that new IPv6 users are still early adopters. Using IPv6 is still 31337 (elite). And you can be 31337, too, by simply deploying IPv6 at your office or home network.