Prep for Tomorrow with an IPv6 Testbed - page 2

On the Horizon...

It may be that your service provider has already rolled out IPv6. You can check by visiting any of these sites:

• KAME project
• Aerasec
• SixXS

If you are connecting over IPv6, you'll see animated logos at the top of the first two sites. SixXS merely displays a dignified text report. Most likely you're not, but it doesn't hurt to look.

Does Your Kernel Support IPv6?

The thorny part is making sure your Linux kernel supports IPv6. Linux kernels since 2.2 have supported IPv6 via loadable kernel modules, but not all distributions ship IPv6-enabled kernels. Fedora comes ready to rock; most of the others don't. The easy way to check is look at your /boot/config-* file. If you see this:

# CONFIG_IPV6 is not set

Too bad so sad, you need to add the modules to your kernel (See Resources). This is what it looks like in Fedora:

$ cat config-2.6.5-1.386 | grep -i ipv6
CONFIG_IPV6=m
CONFIG_IPV6_PRIVACY=y
CONFIG_IPV6_TUNNEL=m
# IPV6: Netfilter Configuration
CONFIG_IPV6_NF_MATCH_IPV6HEADER=m

Also check for the existence of /proc/sys/net/ipv6.

IPv6 Network Utilities

Your old reliable friends ping and traceroute may not be IPv6-clueful, if they are too old. The latest iputils RPM supports both IPv4 and IPv6. On Debian, get the packages iputils-ping and iputils-tracepath.