Monthly Archives: May 2011

IPv6 Migration Resources

In looking into ways to deploy NAT64/DNS64 on the network, I ran into a couple of interesting products which would make either a home migration to IPv6 or an Enterprise migration to IPv6 easier.

The first product is the D-Link DIR-825 wireless LAN router for home users.  The router is IPv6 Ready and supports 6to4 and 6in4 tunneling.  This router would alow someone at home to run dual stack on their home network and connect either to hosts on the IPv4 Internet or the IPv6 Internet automatically.  Retail price at Digitec is CHF 113.00.

The second product is the F5 BigIP load balancer.  This product has an IPv6 Gateway functionality which supports NAT64/DNS64 to help with client and server migrations within an enterprise.  Since this product is in use as the standard loadbalancer at my current enployer, this could be a viable path to move customers to IPv6.  I found an interesting white paper on their migration scenario:  Controlling your Migration to IPv6.

Finally, I have been reading up on the Vyatta network operating system.  It would seem like a lot of companies are interested in using this OS in their products to provide base tunneling, routing and security capabilities without having to develop them themselves.  Citrix is using this software as the basis for their Netscaler Cloud Bridge solution and Riverbed is using it to add routing and firewalling capabilities to their Steelhead appliances.  Since Vyatta has an open source version wich runs on VMWare Player, I think I will give it a try and see how it works.  It should provide full routing functionality, firewalling and its latest version (6.1) is IPv6 certified and may even support NAT64.  If that is the case, then I can give that a try as well.

More on IPv6 Addressing

I have been reading a couple of RFCs on IPv6 and was getting confused with all of the different address types and definitions, so I have decided to make a cheat-sheet to help me next time I need it….

Defined IP addresses:

  • ::ffff:192.0.2.128     IPv4 mapped IPv6 address
  • 2002::/16    6to4 tunnels
  • 2001::/16    teredo tunnels
  • ::1/128   Loopback (link-local scope)
  • fc00::/7    Unique Local unicast Address (ULA) (global-scope) – see blog on IPv6 Addressing
  • fec::/16    Site-local unicast addresses (obsoleted by ULA)
  • fe80::/16   Link-local unicast addresses
  • ff00::/16    Multicast addresses
  • ff02::/16   Link-local multicast addresses
  • ff05::/16  Site-local multicast addresses
  • ff0e::/16  Global multicast addresses
  • ::/0    Default
  • ::/96 ipv4 compatible addresses (obsolete)
  • 3ffe::/16    6bone address range (no longer in use)
  • 2001:db8::/32    Reserved for documentation
  • 64:ff9b::/96    Well known address for NAT64 used to represent global ipv4 addresses in the ipv6 address space after NAT

I have also discovered via wireshark that there are a lot of users of the link local multicast address ff02::/16:

  • ff02::c     Microsoft Simple Service Discovery Protocol (used for universal PnP)
  • ff02::1     All nodes multicast address
  • ff02::2    All routers multicast address
  • ff02::1:ff_ _:_ _ _ _   Solicited node multicast address  where the _ _:_ _ _ _ are the lower order24 bits of the destination nodes address (used for neighbor solicitation)

So this is what I have found so far.  I will keep adding to the list add  addresses pop-up.

Lab Setup with GNS3 and VMWare Player 3.x

So I have finally gotten around to setting up a lab using VMWare Player and GNS3.  I thought I would give it a test just to see how it would work.  I have already installed Ubuntu desktop in VMWare, which of course is simple.  Even enabling the extenstions for transparent mode, full screen, etc. worked fine. My goal, however, was to get GNS3 working so I could continue with further IPv6 tests.

VMWare Player sets up two interfaces: Vmnet1 and Vmnet8.  Vmnet1 is used for the host only network and vmnet8 is used for the nat network.  When I configured GNS3, I  connected the cloud interface to vmnet1.  Once this is done, any router connected to the cloud is in the same network as any VM placed in the host only network.  Compared to the effort it took me to setup Vbox with GNS3 (posted earlier), this time it was quite simple.  Could be that now I have more experience with setting these things up though.