This time, it’s for real … but not fully for me. [IPv6]

On June 6th 2012 was the IPv6 launch day. Following the IPv6 day of the last June, the Internet Society stepped forward and planed the global coming roll-out of the next generation Internet protocol. It was a good time to learn a few facts about the IPv6 and to take stock of my own network equipment.

Introduction

Internet giants like Facebook, Google or Yahoo! take part in the event. The full list of the participants is advertised on the IPv6 launch day website. Just by curiosity, I had a look at the French operators. Among the Network Operators, there are three French ones, not that bad. Unfortunately, SFR, my ISP is not listed. Even more surprising, it looks like France is a leading country for IPv6 adoption.

World IPv6 launch day badge – this time it is for real

So why this switch to IPv6 is unavoidable? The main argument is that with the current version of the Internet Protocol, the IPv4, the number of address possibilities has been overtaken by the number of addresses required by the growth of the global Internet traffic. Everybody knows that. Thanks to eight groups of four hexadecimal digits for IPv6, the combinations are almost countless.

FIRST IMPRESSIONS

I think that everybody working with a computer had to deal with an IPv4 address one day. The helpdesk service of the company I’m currently working for, is used to ask your IP address to take control of the PC for supporting you. That’s easy with an IPv4 address, that will become tricky with the 32 figures of an IPv6 address. More generally, entering IPv6 address without copy/paste will be challenging.

If you have configured a local network, for home or LAN parties, you can’t have miss them. So you know that there are two kinds of IPv4 addresses, the local and the public ones.When you are used to, at a glance, you recognise the two kinds. With IPv6, you have only one kind of address, which is disturbing at the beginning.
An IPv4 network is based on port forwarding, also known as NAT :

A IPv4 local network based on port forwarding (with old school .gif)

If you want to reach a computer behind a router, you have to call it through the public address of the router and a port linked to the local address of the computer. This is a really common operation and probably the first thing that you have to learn if you want to open services like and an FTP server to Internet. With IPv6, this is no longer necessary. Each computer (and not only router or access point) on the Internet have a unique public address and therefore NAT is no longer necessary. One of the most common customizing in routers is dropped.

LET’S TEST IT!

It’s now time to check how my home network is IPv6 compliant. First of all, I make sure that my ISP support IPv6. It does … since last summer. I can now understand why my ISP is not listed in the network operators taking part in the operation: they are not really leaders in this technology.

You can find a bunch of web sites to test your connection. The reference seems to be test-ipv6.com, an open-source platform for testing IPv6 from an engineer of Yahoo!

Let’s do the first test from my laptop (LENOVO T420 on W7):

IPv6 test from Windows 7, Chrome and a DSL connection

All tests are passed successfully, which is a really good news. Let’s now do the same test on my Galaxy Nexus, through the mobile connection:

IPv6 test from Android, Chrome and a 3G mobile connection

This time, the test failed. So the IPv6 protocol, pushed by the need to assign numerous addresses for mobile devices … is not supported through mobile connection!

GOING FURTHER #1 – SWITCHING TO A FULL IPV6 NETWORK

As seen before, my DSL connection and the box of my ISP are IPv6 compliant, which mean that I can browse on full IPv6 sites. The IPv4 addressing is still at the heart of the configuration of a local networking. Can we live without it?

To try that, I cancelled the DHCP service of my router-box. I lost the internet connection entirely. After a short investigation, I found that this was simply due to missing DNS (obvious). An IPv6 address is determined though. I did not push the test further by entering some DNS IPv6 address. There is clearly no option to configure IPv6 services on my box.

GOING FURTHER #2 - IPV6 ADDRESS GENERATION

Before starting my short study, I thought that IPv6 addresses may be unique, one address by device. This is a common belief, but it is not true. IPv6 addresses are variable and depend on your network.

An IPv6 version of DHCP exists, but not on my box (again, there is no IPv6 services available on the configuration panels). There are other methods, like one called stateless auto-configuration, which seems to be widely used (stateless = not based on a server). With this technology, addresses are generated from the MAC address of the interface controller, or from some other temporary informations.

When the first method is used, you can easily recognise it at the pattern of the address. There is a “ff:fe” in the middle of the second part. For example, my Synology NAS supports IPv6 and uses this method:

IPv6 address generated by my Synology NAS

When the other option is used, addresses are renew regularly and looks random. In both case, the first part of the address depends on the router.

CONCLUSION

The good news is that my local network is compliant with IPv6, even if my router offers no option. At least, I’m able to browse pure IPv6 sites. Surprisingly enough, my mobile network does not offer this option. This is really astonishing, considering the fast increasing number of mobile devices connected to Internet.

This was only a first try with the IPv6 protocol. That opens a couple of points I did not address yet:

• Firewalls: are they any special attention to have, considering that all computer can be directly pinged?
• Dynamic IP: are standard services like DynDNS compatible with IPv6?
• Services: which common services (SSH, SAMBA, etc.) sustained IPv6?

If you have any inputs, do not hesitate to post comment!

Note: all links of this page can be found in the delicious stack IPv6.

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