IPv6 First Looks

With predictions of doom and disaster for 2010, i.e. exhaustion of the IPv4 address space rather than the end of the world, I thought it would be good to have a look at how easy it is to implement IPv6 in the home/office network. As any eventual migration from IPv4 will involve none technical users, I tried to do this with minimal research and without any complex PC or router changes.

My ISP has been offering IPv6 for sometime now and it was simple enough to enable. I logged on to the admin interface of my ADSL router and clicked on the button “Enable IP6”. The next stage was to configure my test systems for IPv6 addresses. I decided to use my Windows 7 laptop and Ubuntu 9.10 desktop which I have running as a virtual machine. Windows 7 has IPv6 enabled by default and an address was assigned straight away. For the Ubuntu system, it was easy enough to enable via the GUI.

I then found a few IPv6 web sites using ping6 on Ubuntu and ping -6 on Windows. Not surprisingly, ICAAN and my ISP were IPv6 enabled as were Google and 01net, a French IT news publisher. Disappointingly, there doesn’t seem to be much support from major web sites other than an odd server for research purposes. I then successfully browsed to the sites I had found and made use of various packet capture tools to check that IPv6 was indeed used for the communication.

The next step was to disable IPv4 on both test systems. Ubuntu carried on as normal but the Windows 7 system stopped working. The problem turned out to be the DNS resolution. For whatever reason, my Ubuntu system had a different DNS assignment. Once I manually entered the Ubuntu values into Windows 7 it worked fine. I’m not sure why this problem arose and didn’t have time to investigate further. Whilst troubleshooting the issue, I discovered that into order to type IPv6 addresses directly into the address bar of your browser, you need to put the address in [] brackets.

Conclusions? Well for both Ubuntu and Windows 7 in combination with my ISP’s IPv6 setup, activating IPv6 was simple enough. However, the real issue is of course that most of the sites I visit every day don’t yet support IPv6. Even if they did, they would still need to support IPv4 so as not to shut themselves off from a large part of their user population. It seems that a huge effort will be required, probably mainly on the part of the ISPs to accelerate IPv6 acceptance. Some kind of gateway or tunnelling system will also be required between IPv6 and IPv4 during a transition period. One solution I looked at briefly was an offering from SixXS. Although I didn’t have a chance to install their tunnelling client, I did use their IPv6/IPv4 Website Gateway which allowed me to browse any IPv4 web site from my IPv6 only client. Although I don’t really think that IPv4 saturation will occur this year, it will arrive eventually and will probably cause a significant amount of pain. It will require a mobilisation similar to that seen for the so called Y2K bug. I sense a business opportunity.