While waiting idly for a download to complete, I decided to see what would it require to move to IPv6 on my home network. A quick search indicated that my ancient Netgear WG834GB does not support IPv6. I got a bit distracted by Jonathan’s pages on installing OpenWRT on WG834G. The WG834GB runs a Linux variant and you can telnet into the machine and look around. However I don’t have an alternate wireless router so I did not take the risk of installing OpenWRT.
After reading more about IPv6, I decided to go ahead and take a plunge. Hexago had a nice article on how to go about with IPv6 over IPv4. Microsoft gives a good overview on home setup of IPv6.
I went to go6.net and got registered as cs905s. Downloaded and installed Hexago’s Gateway6 client from go6.net. Start up the client and enter the broker address (broker.freenet6.net) and your user/password. It connected and provided me an IPv6 address (2001:05c0:1000:000b:0000:0000:0000:1b5d) and a brokered address
Later I used another broker - broker.aarnet.net.au. I created another cs905s account – the server sent a random password back. This broker is based on Hexago – so I could use the Gateway6 client with it too. Unlike the freenet6 broker, it did not provide me with a brokered address
Firefox did not like ipv6.l.google.com but Internet Explorer v7 had no problems connecting to the site.
The http://www.sixxs.net/tools/ipv6calc/ site provides some quick information about your IPv6 link. It also provides some fun links, like Virgin Radio.
My conclusions (not verified). Use IPV6 to give unique addresses to all PCs even those behind the NAT. There are two ways to do this, Teredo tunneling and native IPv6. Use the Hexago client and server at this point to get IPv6 addresses for existing machines. I’ll have to look into the native Win2008 and Vista support for ipv6. An alternative to Hexago’s client is AICCU at SixXS. I had to upgrade remote desktop to support IPv6, since the XP version doesn’t support it.
In IPv6 classes no longer exist (Class A, B, C…). Infact even in IPv4 they are dead. The replacement is CIDR which allows variable length network prefixes. This link lets you calculate your CIDR.
“A subnet mask is a bitmask that encodes the prefix length in a form similar to an IP address: 32 bits, starting with a number of 1 bits equal to the prefix length, ending with 0 bits, and encoded in four-part dotted-decimal format. A subnet mask encodes the same information as a prefix length, but predates the advent of CIDR.
CIDR uses variable-length subnet masks (VLSM) to allocate IP addresses to subnets according to individual need, rather than some general network-wide rule. Thus the network/host division can occur at any bit boundary in the address. The process can be recursive, with a portion of the address space being further divided into even smaller portions, through the use of masks which cover more bits.”
The Microsoft site has a very good introduction on TCP/IP . If you are deploying in the office, look at this PDF (link)
Unrelated – Teracopy - good tool for copying files http://www.codesector.com/teracopy.php
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