Spent the entire night trying to tweak IPv6 for my local area network. I managed to get it working on the first try, at least for the wired computers, using the default settings from freenet6.
The problem however, lies with the autoconfiguration. While it makes life a whole lot easier, the way it works is something like DHCP. That’s great, but having an entire 64-bit subnet (that’s more than 18 billion billion IPs, if there’s such a term) for that purpose makes it tough for me to assign reverse DNS for each and every address in that subnet.
So the main task was trying to limit the autoconfigured part to just a small portion of the network, say 8-bits. This is what I slaved for, and yet haven’t achieved so far.
At least I got to see the dancing KAME.
And why did I start all this? Just to get a nice bot on IRCnet. And guess what? There aren’t that many IPv6 servers on that forsaken network.
mood=tired
I just found out that the addresses generated by ‘stateless autoconfiguration’ as they call it is not just a set of randomly generated numbers. It basically just converts the adapters MAC address to the 64-bit host part.
Which means, I’ll have to revert back to the original freenet6 config, and assign DNS entries based on these rules. Phew, that saves a lot of brain work. But… it also means I’ve wasted a ton of time last night. :O
Reference:-
http://www.viagenie.qc.ca/en/ipv6/presentations/ripe40-ipv6tutorial-praha-oct2001.pdf
Another thing, when autoconfiguration is used, it not only assigns a static IP based on the MAC address, but it also assigns another IPv6 address called a ‘private address’. This address’s time to live (TTL) is much lower than the static lease, so its usefulness is such that when you connect to other sites, you’ll be using a totally new IP address every few days. This is supposed to save you from trackers or attacks. Or bosses. Or the authorities. Hm.
Anyway, since I wanted to use my static IPs for everything and to put a name onto, I had to disable private addressing on all LAN clients.
After that, a quick tweak in my DNS files produces an ipv6 connection to EFnet with a fully qualified domain name. Yay!
Next, is to make my sister’s notebook, connected via WiFi, ipv6-connected.
And of course, I didn’t understand a single line of what you wrote ^^ Terrible, aren’t I?
Anyway, good to see you back in action, y0. Lovely layout at that. w00t!
don’t worry. this entry is more like a note-to-self thing. 😀
hopefully, I won’t be posting too many of them, but i’d still like to share some of my geeky experiences. 🙂