Who knew IPv6 would be this easy?

Obvious, with only hours till we run out of ipv4 addresses, I am a little late to the party, but it was ridiculously easy to get an IPv6 tunnel going so that I will be able to happily connect to all those new IPv6-only hosts in the future. It literally took just 5 minutes.

  • On Fedora make sure you also run the network scripts on startup (it seems to default to NetworkManager only these days): chkconfig networking on.
  • Look up your ISP IPv6 tunnel setup procedure (or if they haven’t one yet, look for a public one like Sixxs, Freenet6 or Hurricane Electric).
  • Punch in the ipv4 tunnel address and the ipv6 addresses provided into /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-sit1.
  • Add NETWORKING_IPV6=yes and IPV6_DEFAULTDEV=sit1 to /etc/sysconfig/network.
  • Restart networking: service networking restart.
  • Done! You can now happily explore the IPv6 space: traceroute6 fedoraproject.org. And check http://test-ipv6.com/ to see your are ready for World IPv6 day.

Example /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-sit1 file:

DEVICE=sit1
BOOTPROTO=none
ONBOOT=yes
IPV6INIT=yes
IPV6TUNNELIPV4=198.51.100.241
IPV6ADDR=2001:db8:10:a8c::2

Apparently things are even easier with 6to4 if you have a direct IPv4 address, but the above works even behind a NAT. The above doesn’t use all the fancy IPv6 features yet like providing automatic configuration for all your devices in your network. Such a tunnel will automagically provide you with at least 2^64 IPv6 addresses, and most likely you get a whole IPv6 /48 network meaning you will be getting 2^16 * 2^64 addresses (yes, that is 2^48 times more addresses than there are currently IPv4 addresses in the world!). But it is a nice start to make sure the future transition will be smooth.

See also /usr/share/doc/initscripts-*/ipv6-tunnel.howto and/or /usr/share/doc/initscripts-*/ipv6-6to4.howto for more information, including setting up all the fancy routing stuff on your local network if you want.

One Comment

  1. Josh says:

    One thing I noticed recently is that some routers have 6to4 built-in. I’ve only tested it on AirPort stations but it was as easy as going to the IPv6 settings, switch to Tunnel, let it reboot and then you have IPv6.