Configure an IPv6 address

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IPv6 addressing

Before we get started, know that all customers will have their own /64 IPv6 block at their disposal which provides 18446744073709551616 addresses! A little primer on IPv6 addressing nomenclature first: 1) all addresses are 128-bits long, 2) addresses are specified in hexadecimal so valid characters are ’0-9′ plus ‘a-f’ use a calculator if you need help here, 3) addresses are written as eight 16-bit blocks separated by a colon ‘:’ though a special double-colon ‘::’ can be interpreted as “assume all blocks in between are zero”.

Within our Biscuit control panel you will find your IPv6 /64 address block which will look something like this:

2605:4500:2:1234::/64

This specifies the “prefix” of your address block, and means that you have four more 16-bit segments (the “suffix”) available for you to choose your full and final desired IPv6 address. For example, let’s say we want to add an address with a simple suffix of ’99′, the full address would be:

2605:4500:2:1234:0:0:0:99

or in short form (using ‘::’):

2605:4500:2:1234::99

In the remainder of this article we will assume your desired suffix is ‘YY‘ (which was ’99′ in the example above) and the customer part of your address block is ‘XXXX‘ (which was ’1243′ in the example above). Alright, let’s move on to the fun stuff.. jump to your OS below.

CentOS 6 / Fedora 15

Edit /etc/sysconfig/network and enable IPv6 support.

NETWORKING_IPV6=yes

Use this command to append your IPv6 information to the eth0 config file.

# cat >> /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0 <<EOF
IPV6INIT=yes
IPV6ADDR=2605:4500:2:XXXX::YY/64
IPV6_DEFAULTGW=2605:4500:2::2%eth0
EOF

Ignore prefix length notices in logging.

# cat >> /etc/sysctl.conf <<EOF
net.ipv6.conf.all.accept_ra = 0
net.ipv6.conf.all.autoconf = 0
EOF
# sysctl -p

Restart networking, and you’re done!

# service network restart

Debian / Ubuntu

Use this command to append your IPv6 information to your network configuration file.

# cat >> /etc/network/interfaces <<EOF
iface eth0 inet6 static
        address 2605:4500:2:XXXX::YY
        netmask 64
        up ip -6 route add 2605:4500:2::2 dev eth0
        down ip -6 route del 2605:4500:2::2 dev eth0
EOF

Ignore prefix length notices in logging.

# cat >> /etc/sysctl.conf <<EOF
net.ipv6.conf.all.accept_ra = 0
net.ipv6.conf.all.autoconf = 0
EOF
# sysctl -p

Restart networking, and you’re done!

# /etc/init.d/networking restart

CentOS 5.6

If you are using CentOS 5.6 it’s likely that you are using an older edition of our OS template which included IPv6 support disabled by default. But no big deal, it’s easy to enable it.

# rm /etc/modprobe.d/disable-ipv6.conf
# modprobe ipv6

After that, you can follow the same instructions as per CentOS 6 / Fedora 15.

Test your connectivity

Let’s ping Google! Use the ping6 command to ping using IPv6.

# ping6 -c2 ipv6.google.com
PING ipv6.google.com(qw-in-x68.1e100.net) 56 data bytes
64 bytes from qw-in-x68.1e100.net: icmp_seq=1 ttl=54 time=14.4 ms
64 bytes from qw-in-x68.1e100.net: icmp_seq=2 ttl=54 time=14.6 ms

Issues

If these instructions don’t work for you, feel free to contact the 6sync support team via a trouble ticket.

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