Speaking of Standards

Would you like to get IPv6 up and running on your home network? Do you use an Apple Time Capsule, AirPort Extreme or AirPort Express for your WiFi access point? If so, here are the very simple steps you can take to get set up with IPv6 at home. What you are going to be doing is tunneling IPv6 packets over IPv4. Think of it like a special kind of VPN that you are going to be establishing between your home network and Tunnelbroker.net, which is operated by Hurricane Electric. From Tunnelbroker.net you’ll then connect out to the “regular” IPv6 Internet.

NOTE: This will work with any of the Apple access point devices: Time Capsule, Airport Extreme or Airport Express. However, the instructions below do assume you have the latest firmware, which right now is 7.5.2.

For starters, I’ll go to IPv6-test.com and verify that I am NOT using IPv6 right now (and yes, I’m covering some of the IP addresses in this post):

Now let’s start the process…

1. Register with Tunnelbroker.net

Head over to Tunnelbroker.net and register for a free account if you don’t already have one:

2. Create a new IPv6 tunnel

Once you are logged in, you click on “Create Regular Tunnel”, which will bring you to this page: (I already have created 1 of the 5 tunnels you can create with a free account, so my screen may be different from what you see)

All you really need to do here is copy/paste the IP address you are viewing from into the “IPv4 endpoint” box on the form:

You also need to choose which of the Tunnelbroker servers are nearest to you, but odds are you can just take their recommendation. After entering the IP address and server selection, just hit “Submit” and you’ll have your IPv6-to-IPv4 tunnel all set up on the Tunnelbroker side. Click on the “Tunnel Details” link on the confirmation page and you should see a page like this:

Now you are ready to flip over to your Apple access point and configure IPv6…

3. Connect to your Apple access point

You need to now open the “AirPort Utility” application on a Mac. It is typically found in the “Utilities” folder inside of your “Applications” folder. When you launch it, the app will discover any of your wireless devices and give you the chance to administer them. Select the device you want and then press the “Manual Setup” button in the lower left corner:

4. Open the IPv6 Admin Panel

Next click on the “Advanced” icon on the top and then the “IPv6″ panel tab. You should see a screen that says that IPv6 is currently configured in “Link-local only” mode:

5. Configure the Tunnel

Now you just change the mode to “Tunnel” and enter the information from your Tunnelbroker.net configuration back in step #2. Here are the mappings you need to know from the Tunnelbroker info into the AirPort configuration.

AirPort Utility	Tunnelbroker.net
Remote IPv4 Address	Server IPv4 Address
WAN IPv6 Address	Client IPv6 Address
IPv6 Default Route	Server IPv6 Address
LAN IPv6 Address	Routed /64

The “LAN IPv6 Address” deserves some explanation. This is the range of IP addresses that will be allocated on your internal LAN, and the address you enter here is the IPv6 address of the “LAN interface” of your AirPort device.

Note: I don’t want people on the IPv6 Internet to be able to connect to services running on my AirPort/Time Capsule, so I chose “Block incoming IPv6 connections” so that people on the IPv6 Internet could not connect directly to my device.

Reboot and Revel In Your IPv6-ness!

After you press “Update”, your AirPort device will reboot and when it comes back up you should just be able to browse with your WiFi connected device to IPv6-test.com and see that you are now live on the IPv6 Internet:

Congratulations! You now have IPv6 on your home network!

So Now What?

Okay, so now you have IPv6… what can you do with it? Well… you could visit Google via IPv6 … or Facebook … or any of a range of other IPv6-enabled websites… or check out some of the “cool stuff” for IPv6 identified by Sixxs… or connect over IPv6 to services running on IPv6-enabled servers that you are testing out. Or you could expose services you have running locally out over IPv6 (see caveat below). Or… you could just use IPv6 at home to learn about IPv6… sooner or later we’re all going to need to know more about it.

Two Critical Caveats

Two important things to think about with using this setup:

1. Tunnelbroker.net relies on a static IPv4 address on your end

For the IPv6-to-IPv4 tunnel to work, Tunnelbroker.net assumes your home IP address will not change. For most of us in the US, anyway, that’s not a safe assumption. If your IPv4 address changes, you have to either:

a. Login to Tunnelbroker.net and manually update the info in your tunnel configuration; or
b. Use the URL provided by Tunnelbroker to update your IPv4 endpoint (details at the link).

Those who want to figure it out could create a script that would notice the IP address changing and ping that URL automagically. (Mine doesn’t change enough – and I don’t rely on IPv6 enough – to go through the work. It did happen once that IPv6 wasn’t working, so I just looked at my external IP and then went and manually changed the tunnel info.)

2. Do think about security – you have a live, PUBLIC IPv6 address

You do have a public IPv6 address. Right now there may not be hordes of attackers out there trying to hit IPv6 systems (or there might be)… but do realize that you are on the public Internet (albeit the IPv6 side). There is a IPv6 Firewall part to the AirPort devices. You will want to look at that if you are going to make services available over the IPv6 network. You may also choose to do what I do and simply block all incoming IPv6 connections.

One Final Note

To make this work, your AirPort device does not need to be directly connected to your Internet gateway or cable/DSL modem. In my case, I have a Linux server that is connected to the Internet and is providing a firewall and NAT to my home network. My Time Capsule is then behind that gateway/server on my NAT’ted internal network. What I’ve outlined here still works, though – and I didn’t have to configure anything on the firewall/server. You may or may not need to if you have a similar configuration.

With that, I’ll say… enjoy! And know that you are now one of the folks getting ready for the next stage of Internet evolution!

Have you ever been coding in HTML or CSS and found yourself wondering exactly what the attributes were to a given element? Or wondering what values an attribute can have?

If so, the W3C offers this great “cheatsheet” at:

http://www.w3.org/2009/cheatsheet/

where you can simply enter a search string and look up info about HTML, CSS, SVG or XPath.

For instance, say I wanted to know more about the <div> tag in HTML, I can just enter it and then get a result with links to learn more about the possible attributes or to click over and read the actual specification:

The site nicely provides suggestions as you type. For instance, I started typing “align” and received these suggestions:

As you can probably guess from the tabs in the screenshots, the site also provides information about development for mobile browsers and guidance around accessiblity, internationalization and typography. A great resource for anyone who is coding up their site. Visit the cheatsheet at the W3C’s site to try it out yourself.

As I worked late last week on a new revision of the P2PSIP security overview Internet-Draft of which I am a co-author, I wound up learning of a wonderful hosted tool provided by the IETF called “Idspell”:

http://tools.ietf.org/tools/idspell/idspell.pyht

All you do is upload a text version of your I-D and… ta da… it goes through and checks the spelling in your draft. What’s great about Idspell versus the standard spell-checker in any editor, is that it has been preloaded with IETF-specific info. On the IETF Tools page it says:

Idspell uses an IETF-specific wordlist built from the last 2 years’ published RFCs, surnames of recent I-D authors and some manually added words.

It’s just one of many tools that have been made available to help authors more easily create Internet-Drafts. Very useful!

P.S. For those curious to see the latest version of the P2PSIP security overview Internet-Draft, I’m trying an experiment in using Github as a repository for my I-Ds. You can find them there at http://github.com/danyork/internet-drafts-york/tree/master

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Technorati Tags: IETF, standards, Internet-Drafts