Installing IPv6 Support

[freastro]

I've been running Gentoo with the ipv6 use flag for a few months, but never bothered to go beyond that. I saw an article on IPv6 today and thought I would finish setting up my server for IPv6 support. Surprise surprise, I find out that I can't even ping6 ::1, which I figure means there's no kernel IPv6 support. Are there any plans to support IPv6 (like when the module is no longer experimental) or am I missing something? Thanks!

[Rick]

Hi freastro, Welcome to the forum and thanks for the good question.

IPv6 is definately something our company will support when the time is right. As of right now, unless you are doing some trick to tunnel over ipv4, you have no ipv6 address on your Rapid. So, trying to reach any other ipv6 address will be futile.

So, the next question is, when will we support ipv6. Theres 2 blockers for this- proper virtualization support and acquiring the addresses themselves. IPv6 on VZ requires OSI layer2 virtualization. We institute layer 3 virtualizsation (venet), mainly for security reasons. Layer2 virtualization gives each environment more flexibility and control, but that also means you can assign any layer3 address to your interface that you want. From my experience working in datacenters, customers have a nasty habit of assigning addresses they aren't officially assigned, but are technically able to aquire. This leads to mysterious network problems due to ip conflicts on a network. So, we avoid this situation by assigning customer addresses to their environment for them, and each environment cannot modify that. This is why Rapid ifconfig doesn't perform like a standard unix box.

I don't have a IPv6 date right now, but as soon as its technically and possible to do securely, we will jump on the ipv6 bandwagon. I really like many of the features of ipv6, and it will allow us to fine tune and secure the network (such as mitigating spoofed syn floods more effectively) better then ipv4 could ever allow.