IPv6 – Proxy the neighbors (or come back ARP – we loved you really)


After three articles, where am I with my venture in to IPv6? What have we really achieved so far? Well, in functional terms, not so very much yet!!

To recap:

  • Here I covered a lot of ground, getting basic IPv6 running on a Linux gateway box connected to an ISP providing native IPv6, while remembering stuff like the need to set up a firewall.
  • Here I looked at the issue of IPv6 firewall logging
  • And here I looked at the need to set up a default route out of the gateway device pointing back towards the internet.

And what can I now actually do? Well……. from the gateway box I can ping out successfully to any IPv6 device on the Internet. In other words, logged in to the device in green on this diagram, I can ping out of eth0 over the Internet. And from an IPv6 device on the Internet I can successfully ping towards my green box, using the address of eth0. So I can ping from the Internet to (these are of course made-up addresses!) 123::456.


Continue reading IPv6 – Proxy the neighbors (or come back ARP – we loved you really)

March 24th, 2010 | Tags: , , , , , , , | Category: FPage | 37 comments

IPv6 and default routes

Following on from my first tutorial, we have a box set up which has basic IPv6 connectivity. There’s a firewall in place with a simple but sufficient configuration. And we can ping6 from this box to remote IPv6 destinations.

All of this has, so far, made use only of one network interface (in my case eth0) to set things up. However looking ahead to the next step I am aware that I will want devices inside my network (i.e. my workstations, etc.) to have IPv6 connectivity through this device I am setting up. In other words, this device must, as it does today for IPv4, act as a router.

With IPv4 this is, at a basic level (so forgetting about firewalling and so on) very easy: enable IPv4 forwarding and away you go.

For IPv6? A little more complicated…

Continue reading IPv6 and default routes

March 5th, 2010 | Tags: , , , , , | Category: FPage | 4 comments