Adcantage to using IPv6 on Linode?
Also, I am wandering what the point of switching to IPv6 now would be. From what I understand, IPv6 was brought about because all the possible IP addresses available to IPv4 are starting to get taken up. While I have noticed that some of the local ISPs seem to be assigning static IPs instead of dynamic, I find it hard to believe that there are enough people on the Internet to cause issues (of course, I'm not taking servers into account, though a lot of servers belong to shared hosting providers).
Putting the population of cyberspace aside, though, what else would I need to look at here for IPv6?
7 Replies
You may need to reconfigure some of the daemons you mentioned to bind to both your v4 and v6 addresses. You will also need to configure any firewall rules you have separately (iptables vs ip6tables).
The point of enabling IPv6 now is to ensure all of your services are working as expected and iron out any bugs you encounter. IPv4 exhaustion may not be causing problems at this exact moment, but we know what the failure modes are going to look like. If you take the time now to learn and prepare, your services will be IPv6 ready while your peers will be panicking.
I thought I was going to be "forced" to switch completely to IPv6 since I wasn't reading the Manager page right… I need to open my eyes
Tunnel Broker
@Piki:
I suppose the next question is: Since I don't have an IPv6 connection to test from (not even another Linode, nor any cohorts that have an IPv6 connection), how would I test the new configuration?
You can test you have IPv6 connectivity by using ping6 to an address with AAAA records
eg
% ping6 www.ip6test.com
PING www.ip6test.com(ns1.ip6test.com) 56 data bytes
64 bytes from ns1.ip6test.com: icmp_seq=0 ttl=52 time=154 ms
64 bytes from ns1.ip6test.com: icmp_seq=1 ttl=52 time=153 ms
64 bytes from ns1.ip6test.com: icmp_seq=2 ttl=52 time=153 ms
64 bytes from ns1.ip6test.com: icmp_seq=3 ttl=52 time=153 ms
64 bytes from ns1.ip6test.com: icmp_seq=4 ttl=52 time=153 ms
^C
--- www.ip6test.com ping statistics ---
5 packets transmitted, 5 received, 0% packet loss, time 4003ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 153.525/153.828/154.116/0.473 ms, pipe 2
ping6 only uses IPv6 so if it works then you have connectivity
The website at
It doesn't address this situation, but the turtle on
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Why do I consider IPv6 to be a requirement? Being able to directly communicate between any and all of my servers/workstations irregardless of location is important to me. I should be able to securely and efficiently access the same resources whether I am sitting at my workstation, logged into my Linode or using my netbook on the bus, without having to do strange tricks with bastion hosts or port forwarding.
In other words, imagine a global, ubiquitous network where each computer has a unique, public IP address, and there is no NAT. That's the IPv6 Internet (minus the ubiquitous part…). It's not quite as awesome as a world without war and hunger, but the magnitude is roughly the same. (If John Lennon were alive today…)
Also, at least with Linode, all Linodes within a datacenter are within the same address range. This means the private network trick for unmetered data transfer isn't necessary, so the same IP address can be used for inter- and intra-datacenter traffic. Good stuff.