IPv6: The final frontier

My lecturer Andy Linton was going into detail about IPv6 the other day and suggested I sign up to sixxs.net and get my home network running IPv6, so I did just that.

They use a system where you get given a certain amount of credits when you sign up, spend them to make changes to your account (adding/deleting tunnels and subnets etc) or when your connection times out, and slowly accumulate them for keeping your tunnel open for a long period of time. There are three different types of tunnel - static IP with straight 6-in-4, dynamic IP with the heartbeat protocol to notify of any IP changes which also uses straight 6-in-4, and a system called AYIYA (anything in anything) which encapsulates IPv6 in UDP.

Thinking that my brand new router would be able to route IPv6 without any issues (or at least 6-in-4) I mistakenly signed up for a heartbeat tunnel, only to find out that short of explicit routing I would need to have a DMZ server set up... so I settled on the AYIYA protocol in the end.

I got their AICCU client set up, it has a package in the debian repository which made everything really easy, and the only moderately hard bit was making sure I removed all the autoconf IPv6 addresses from eth1 (long story why I don't have eth0 but it's a testament to my unsuitability as a system admin) before adding new ones, only to find that all the original addresses were fe80::/64 anyway so the whole exercise was almost a total waste of time.

After configuring my addresses on my windows 7 box (todo: install DHCPv6 server) and rebooting bind, everything was pinging fine, but none of my browsers would go to IPv6 websites. I assume it's to do with not having a global subnet yet, so that'll have to wait until after my subnet request gets approved.

Todo:

Choose a firewall (ufw? modify my old iptables script?)
Firewall server (because a global IPv6 address is going to take me back to dialup days where no password = free access to SMB shares, but that's another story for another day)
Install DHCPv6 (I've ALWAYS wanted to have a DHCP server that hands out global IP addresses)
Configure DNS (I'm thinking I'll keep my dummy 10.1.1.* records for my domains that are hosted locally, but add some reverse DNS entries once I get that delegated)