Saturday, October 27, 2007

IPv6 for Raccoon

We've recently set up an external server at LayeredTech to provide us with a remote DNS server, secondary MX, etc. I've got no complaints about LayeredTech — thus far they've been great. But earlier this week I decided I wanted something they couldn't provide.

All our core services on campus are IPv6-enabled, including hippo.ru.ac.za which provides an IPv6 CCTLD for about seven countries. So naturally we wanted to IPv6-enable the machine at LayeredTech. For one thing it'd help us with testing. More importantly, however, we believe it is the right thing to be doing on the current Internet.

Despite reading on their support forums that LayeredTech had no immediate plans for supporting IPv6, I noticed that they'd got a LIR allocation from ARIN. A little hopeful, I e-mailed LayeredTech's help-desk. They confirmed that IPv6 is work-in-progress, but isn't yet available to their customers.

All isn't lost though. The good folks at SixXS provide free IPv6 tunnels for people in our sort of situation. So I went through their (reasonably painless) registration process and now have a tunnel ending at OCCAID. It's not exactly what I wanted (i.e. native IPv6), but it's perfectly adequate for the sort of testing I want to do.

If anyone's in the same boat as us, I recommend SixXS.

posted by guy at: 16:58 SAST | path: /systems | permanent link