Month: May 2010

Posted on

IPv6

I wasn’t aware before, but it actually is pretty easy to setup IPv6 (using a 6to4 tunnel) on a distribution which uses initscripts (Fedora, Mandriva, probably others). See http://linux.yyz.us/ipv6-fc2-howto.html for the full details.

So if your ISP doesn’t do IPv6:

  1. Add the following to /etc/sysconfig/network: 
    NETWORKING_IPV6=yes
IPV6_DEFAULTDEV=tun6to4
  2. Add the following to /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0: 
    IPV6INIT=yes
IPV6TO4INIT=yes
  3. /etc/init.d/network restart

Note: If you have a firewall you probably want to review these rules. See above URL in those cases. I still noticed that connections to sites use IPv4 by default (even when IPv6 is available). The reason and solution is described at: http://wahjava.wordpress.com/2007/12/13/unable-to-view-ipv6-site-over-6to4-connection-in-firefox/. Initscripts also has some documentation. On my distribution it is available at /usr/share/doc/initscripts/ipv6-6to4.howto.

Thanks to Tomas Ögren (one of the ftp.acc.umu.se/ftp.gnome.org admins) for suggesting this.

For the GNOME infrastructure, most machines are hosted by Red Hat. They’re at least a year away from providing IPv6 (it is also not a high priority unfortunately). Above solution is fine for me, but not something good enough for the GNOME infrastructure (don’t want to rely on an unknown for the IPv6 connectivity of GNOME.org).