IPv6 Network Administration - Softcover

Murphy, Niall Richard; Malone PH.D., David

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0596009348 ISBN 13: 9780596009342

Publisher: O'Reilly Media, 2005

Synopsis

What once seemed nearly impossible has turned into reality. The number of available Internet addresses is now nearly exhausted, due mostly to the explosion of commercial websites and entries from an expanding number of countries. This growing shortage has effectively put the Internet community--and some of its most brilliant engineers--on alert for the last decade.Their solution was to create IPv6, a new Internet standard which will ultimately replace the current and antiquated IPv4. As the new backbone of the Internet, this new protocol would fix the most difficult problems that the Internet faces today--scalability and management. And even though IPv6's implementation has met with some resistance over the past few years, all signs are now pointing to its gradual worldwide adoption in the very near future. Sooner or later, all network administrators will need to understand IPv6, and now is a good time to get started.IPv6 Network Administration offers administrators the complete inside info on IPv6. This book reveals the many benefits as well as the potential downsides of this next-generation protocol. It also shows readers exactly how to set up and administer an IPv6 network.A must-have for network administrators everywhere, IPv6 Network Administration delivers an even-handed approach to what will be the most fundamental change to the Internet since its inception. Some of the other IPv6 assets that are covered include:

• routing
• integrated auto-configuration
• quality-of-services (QoS)
• enhanced mobility
• end-to-end security

IPv6 Network Administration explains what works, what doesn't, and most of all, what's practical when considering upgrading networks from the current protocol to IPv6.

About this title

About the Author

Niall Murphy has worked in the I.T. and Internet industries since 1995. His initial exposure to computers came with an Amstrad CPC 464 in the early 1980s, from which he never recovered. In college, Niall founded the UCD Internet Society which, at its height, gave Internet access to over two and a half thousand students who would not otherwise have had it. He also played way too much chess.

During the process of obtaining a degree in Computer Science and Mathematics, he held down a variety of programming, system and network administration and security-related jobs. After college, he went on to found his own consulting company, and participate in the start-up phase of a large number of companies and projects including Club Internet, Digifone On-Line, and Hutchison 3G. He used to run the root nameservers for Ireland, and is proud of having started five RIPE LIRs.

He has experience in networking of almost every kind (with the grateful exception of X.25) UNIX and Windows system administration, C systems programming, Perl, PHP, database creation and management, and Internet/IP services of all kinds, with specialities in database-backed web applications, wireless networking and next-generation networking.

As per the old adage, he thinks UNIX is the worst operating system there is, apart from all the others. He is a published poet, RFC co-author and O' Reilly co-author who does landscape photography for fun; you can see some of his work at South Bull Photography.

David Malone is a mathematician-cum-sysadmin. He is a researcher in the Hamilton Institute in Maynooth, Ireland, working on mathematical models of communications networks. Since 1994, he's also been a member of the sysadmin team of the School of Mathematics located in Trinity College Dublin, Ireland. There he helps to maintain a Unix-like service provided by FreeBSD and Linux machines. Naturally, they all speak IPv6.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

CHAPTER 5 Installation and Configuration

Of a good beginning cometh a good end.
—Proverbes, John Heywood

We now want to look at actually configuring the IPv6 stacks on various operating platforms. First we’ll describe the support present in each platform and say how to install and enable it. As the state of the art progresses, of course, the sort of instructions in this chapter should become less and less relevant, since hardly anyone needs to know how to install their IPv4 stack on their machine! Then we’ll move on to the specifics of commands for testing the stack, displaying information about it and troubleshooting. This part of the chapter contains many tables showing the details of configuring the basic aspects of IPv6 on all the platforms. Tables of details rarely make exciting reading, but they are necessary because of variations between the platforms we cover. The overall aim is that, at the end of this chapter, you should have the requisite information to take a new machine from zero to hero on your IPv6 network.

We don’t cover anything other than the simplest of transition mechanisms, however, so if your network relies on complicated ways to get an IPv6 connection, or if you are looking to understand how best to support IPv6 from a network manager’s perspective, we advise you to look at Chapter 4, the planning chapter.

Finally, before we close the chapter we have a look at some common problems you might encounter as you take your first steps with IPv6.

Right—now it’s on to the fine detail!

Workstations and Servers
In this section, we run through various workstation and server platforms, commenting on their IPv6 support and anything you may need to watch out for while enabling them. The operating systems we look at include versions of Windows, Mac OS X, and various Unix(-like) systems.

Windows
Microsoft’s support for IPv6 is quite thorough, albeit relatively recent and unfortunately geared towards for their current and future products more than their past ones. Microsoft’s plan for IPv6, and numerous useful articles are available at microsoft.com/ipv6.This package creates a new protocol, unsurprisingly called IPv6, which can be manipulated and bound to various network adapters via the usual control
panel interface.

The package is slightly tricky to install. Be sure to follow the instructions are included in the FAQ referenced on the page mentioned above. Note that the procedure is service pack specific and may need to be manually reinstalled after a service pack upgrade. Also, Microsoft consider the patch a technology preview and do not recommend running it in a production environment. For these reasons, Windows XP or Windows 2003 are a better choice for running IPv6 on a Windows platform.

Windows XP
Windows XP comes with IPv6 support by default, though you do need to enable it manually. Easily done: you open a command prompt and issue the command ipv6 install. Windows XP Service Pack 1 also supports installing IPv6 via the Network Connections control panel. Officially, the stack shipped with Service Pack 1 is of production quality, and the earlier versions are developer previews. Despite this, the stack shipped with Service Pack 1 identifies itself as a developers edition. This is slightly confusing but not actually harmful. Service Pack 2 extends this support even further, including an IPv6 firewall by default and Toredo which allows IPv6 through NAT.

Microsoft has some useful information about the capabilities and configuration of the stack shipped with XP available from it’s IPv6 pages at microsoft.com/ipv6 but most of the configuration can be done with the ipv6 command, with finer control over the stack available using netsh. Basic testing of IPv6 connectivity can be accomplished with ping6 and tracert6.

There is one peculiarity however: some versions of Windows will automatically configure routing via 6to4 if a global IPv4 address is found and no IPv6 router is present on the LAN. This has caught some people by surprise.

Windows Server 2003
Windows Server 2003 also has IPv6 support, but it goes beyond what’s included in Windows XP—the IPv6 stack is a full stack nearly on a par with its IPv4 cousin. The ipv6 command is also being deprecated in Server 2003, and the equivalent netsh commands are now preferred. Microsoft provides a handy crib sheet of ipv6 and netsh equivalent commands at microsoft.com/windowsserver2003/technologies/ipv6/ipv62netshtable.mspx.

Again, IPv6 can be enabled via the command line by running netsh interface ipv6 install, or from the Network Connections control panel (right click on a LAN interface to edit its Properties - Install - Protocol - Add - Microsoft TCP/IP Version 6).

Support for IPv6 ping and traceroute are also available in the traditional ping and tracert commands without the "6" suffix.

Other versions of Windows
If you run any variety of Windows 98 or NT 4, then, at the moment, you are out of luck. Since these products have been end-of-lifed, it is unlikely that useful IPv6 support for them will be forthcoming from Microsoft. However, third party support is available via products such as Trumpet Winsock* and Hitachi’s Toolnet6.†

A stack for Windows CE.NET is available. One interesting question is whether or not we will see IPv6 on the X-Box. You would expect that non-NATed peer-to-peer gaming would be a core attraction of IPv6, but we’ll have to wait and see.

IPv6 applications on Windows
As mentioned, all versions of the Microsoft IPv6 stack come with the basic diagnostic tools like ping and traceroute. Some versions also ship with a tool called pathping, which is an interesting cross between traceroute and ping. It does an initial traceroute and then calculates statistics relating to round-trip-time and loss. The old command-line tools, telnet and ftp, also support IPv6. For applications, such as Internet Explorer, that use wininet.dll. IPv6 support should be essentially transparent, particularly for those applications using DNS rather than endpoints specified by explicit IPv6 address.

Edition details

• Publisher: O'Reilly Media
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 0596009348
• ISBN 13: 9780596009342
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 275