2008
Monday
19
May

An IPv6 at home experiment

I don't know how many people tried this before but here is my account on using IPv6 at home. the affair consumed between a Linux machine acting as router and a Mac OS laptop acting as client.

First thing I noticed is that Mac OS is configuring the interface by picking an address from the fe80::/10 range, the link-local prefix. Another obvious thing after a little tcpdump-ing is that Mac OS is continuously searching for routers using some ICMP6 datagrams. One program that knows how to send router advertisements is radvd. The packet is available in Debian so installing it was a piece of cake. For a moment I though that I will not need to pick a network address for my network but radvd didn't want to work without one so I picked a /64 in 2001:db8::/32 but probably a more correct prefix is fc00::/7. Wikipedia explains this better. So at this point I reached the point in which I could ping the Linux box.

The second step was to configure the DNS. My first attempt was to used Dibbler but Mac OS doesn't have support for DHCPv6. :| In fact, the only way to configure the DNS for IPv6 in Mac OS is to do it manual.

I usually use dnscache from djbdns but because it doesn't know IPv6 I had to search for an alternative. The solution I chose is proxy server called Trick Or Treat Daemon (totd). The packet is already in Debian but I had to do some tricks to get working version I tried from stable. First, the totdconfig configuration program doesn't work if the /etc/totd.conf is missing and second, totd didn't want to start unless /var/run/totd is created. So a 'touch /etc/totd.conf' and 'mkdir /var/run/totd' solved the problem.

One last thing is the translation between IPv4 and IPv6. I found two solutions: naptd, an implementation of NAT-PT and ptrtd, an implementation of TRT. None of them are available in the Debian repository but I found a deb for naptd here and one for ptrtd here. I tried the latter and it worked well for me. The only thing I need to edit is the prefix mentioned in /etc/default/ptrtd.

And now here are some things that I notice that doesn't work:

  • all the IM services from Adium except GTalk
  • 'Cached' results from Google
  • Skype starts without errors but it cannot connect to any of the peers
  • Gizmo doesn't start
  • iChat doesn't leave the 'Connecting...' phase
  • FlickrExport 1.3.4 (iPhoto 6)
  • YouTube videos

You may ask what did work. Web browsing (Safari, Camino, Firefox, Vienna), ssh, ping6. :P

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