6.1. IPv6 Tunneling

This is another application of the tunneling capabilities of Linux. It is popular among the IPv6 early adopters, or pioneers if you like. The 'hands-on' example described below is certainly not the only way to do IPv6 tunneling. However, it is the method that is often used to tunnel between Linux and a Cisco IPv6 capable router and experience tells us that this is just the thing many people are after. Ten to one this applies to you too ;-)

A short bit about IPv6 addresses:

IPv6 addresses are, compared to IPv4 addresses, really big: 128 bits against 32 bits. And this provides us just with the thing we need: many, many IP-addresses: 340,282,266,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,465 to be precise. Apart from this, IPv6 (or IPng, for IP Next Generation) is supposed to provide for smaller routing tables on the Internet's backbone routers, simpler configuration of equipment, better security at the IP level and better support for QoS.

An example: 2002:836b:9820:0000:0000:0000:836b:9886

Writing down IPv6 addresses can be quite a burden. Therefore, to make life easier there are some rules:

• Don't use leading zeroes. Same as in IPv4.

• Use colons to separate every 16 bits or two bytes.

• When you have lots of consecutive zeroes, you can write this down as ::. You can only do this once in an address and only for quantities of 16 bits, though.

The address 2002:836b:9820:0000:0000:0000:836b:9886 can be written down as 2002:836b:9820::836b:9886, which is somewhat friendlier.

Another example, the address 3ffe:0000:0000:0000:0000:0020:34A1:F32C can be written down as 3ffe::20:34A1:F32C, which is a lot shorter.

IPv6 is intended to be the successor of the current IPv4. Because it is relatively new technology, there is no worldwide native IPv6 network yet. To be able to move forward swiftly, the 6bone was introduced.

Native IPv6 networks are connected to each other by encapsulating the IPv6 protocol in IPv4 packets and sending them over the existing IPv4 infrastructure from one IPv6 site to another.

That is precisely where the tunnel steps in.

To be able to use IPv6, we should have a kernel that supports it. There are many good documents on how to achieve this. But it all comes down to a few steps:

• Get yourself a recent Linux distribution, with suitable glibc.

• Then get yourself an up-to-date kernel source.

• Go to /usr/src/linux and type:

• make menuconfig

• Choose "Networking Options"

• Select "The IPv6 protocol", "IPv6: enable EUI-64 token format", "IPv6: disable provider based addresses"

In other words, compile IPv6 as 'built-in' in your kernel. You can then save your config like usual and go ahead with compiling the kernel.

HINT: Before doing so, consider editing the Makefile: EXTRAVERSION = -x ; --> ; EXTRAVERSION = -x-IPv6

There is a lot of good documentation about compiling and installing a kernel, however this document is about something else. If you run into problems at this stage, go and look for documentation about compiling a Linux kernel according to your own specifications.

The file /usr/src/linux/README might be a good start. After you accomplished all this, and rebooted with your brand new kernel, you might want to issue an '/sbin/ifconfig -a' and notice the brand new 'sit0-device'. SIT stands for Simple Internet Transition. You may give yourself a compliment; you are now one major step closer to IP, the Next Generation ;-)

Now on to the next step. You want to connect your host, or maybe even your entire LAN to another IPv6 capable network. This might be the "6bone" that is setup especially for this particular purpose.

Let's assume that you have the following IPv6 network: 3ffe:604:6:8::/64 and you want to connect it to 6bone, or a friend. Please note that the /64 subnet notation works just like with regular IP addresses.

Your IPv4 address is 145.100.24.181 and the 6bone router has IPv4 address 145.100.1.5

# ip tunnel add sixbone mode sit remote 145.100.1.5 [local 145.100.24.181 ttl 255]
# ip link set sixbone up
# ip addr add 3FFE:604:6:7::2/126 dev sixbone
# ip route add 3ffe::0/16 dev sixbone

Let's discuss this. In the first line, we created a tunnel device called sixbone. We gave it mode sit (which is IPv6 in IPv4 tunneling) and told it where to go to (remote) and where to come from (local). TTL is set to maximum, 255.

Next, we made the device active (up). After that, we added our own network address, and set a route for 3ffe::/15 (which is currently all of 6bone) through the tunnel. If the particular machine you run this on is your IPv6 gateway, then consider adding the following lines:

# echo 1 >/proc/sys/net/ipv6/conf/all/forwarding
# /usr/local/sbin/radvd

The latter, radvd is -like zebra- a router advertisement daemon, to support IPv6's autoconfiguration features. Search for it with your favourite search-engine if you like. You can check things like this:

# /sbin/ip -f inet6 addr

If you happen to have radvd running on your IPv6 gateway and boot your IPv6 capable Linux on a machine on your local LAN, you would be able to enjoy the benefits of IPv6 autoconfiguration:

# /sbin/ip -f inet6 addr
1: lo: <LOOPBACK,UP> mtu 3924 qdisc noqueue inet6 ::1/128 scope host

3: eth0: <BROADCAST,MULTICAST,UP> mtu 1500 qdisc pfifo_fast qlen 100
inet6 3ffe:604:6:8:5054:4cff:fe01:e3d6/64 scope global dynamic
valid_lft forever preferred_lft 604646sec inet6 fe80::5054:4cff:fe01:e3d6/10 
scope link

You could go ahead and configure your bind for IPv6 addresses. The A type has an equivalent for IPv6: AAAA. The in-addr.arpa's equivalent is: ip6.int. There's a lot of information available on this topic.

There is an increasing number of IPv6-aware applications available, including secure shell, telnet, inetd, Mozilla the browser, Apache the webserver and a lot of others. But this is all outside the scope of this Routing document ;-)

On the Cisco side the configuration would be something like this:

! interface Tunnel1 description IPv6 tunnel no ip address no ip directed-broadcast ipv6 enable ipv6 address 3FFE:604:6:7::1/126 tunnel source Serial0 tunnel destination 145.100.24.181 tunnel mode ipv6ip ! ipv6 route 3FFE:604:6:8::/64 Tunnel1

But if you don't have a Cisco at your disposal, try one of the many IPv6 tunnel brokers available on the Internet. They are willing to configure their Cisco with an extra tunnel for you. Mostly by means of a friendly web interface. Search for "ipv6 tunnel broker" on your favourite search engine.