 The IPv6 Internet:
Connect Today with Linux
Ibrahim Haddad
The Internet protocol version 6 (IPv6) is the next generation Internet protocol
designed by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) as a replacement for
the Internet protocol version 4 (IPv4). Most of today's Internet uses IPv4,
which has been remarkably resilient despite its age; however, it is beginning
to have problems in various areas. Its most visible shortcoming is the growing
shortage of IPv4 addresses needed by all the new devices connecting to the Internet.
Other limitations exist in Quality-of-Service (QoS), security, auto-configuration,
and mobility aspects. As a result, the IETF defined IPv6 to fix the problems
in IPv4 and added many enhancements to cater to the future Internet.
Migration from IPv4 to IPv6 has been underway for a few years now, encouraged
by the availability of IPv6 implementations on most operating systems and router
platforms, and the availability of an IPv6 backbone that is being used for testing
and deployment. In this article, I will provide a tutorial that will allow you
to enable IPv6 support on your Linux machine and connect it to the IPv6 backbone
(also called IPv6 Internet or the 6bone).
IPv6 Support in the Linux Kernel
You can enable support for IPv6 in the Linux kernel both as a built-in feature
and as a loadable module. I will demonstrate both methods using a Linux machine
installed with Fedora Core and running kernel version 2.6.0-test11 (latest version
available at the time of writing).
You can either use your currently installed kernel source, or download the
latest kernel from the Web. In my examples, I use the latest experimental version
2.6.0-test11, but you can use any other 2.4
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