Speaking of Standards

Do you want to get your home network set up with globally routable IPv6 addresses? If you have an Apple WiFi base station, I previously explained the easy instructions for how to configure IPv6 using an Apple AirPort or Time Capsule. However, ever since I wrote that, I’ve had people ask me…

What if I don’t have an Apple base station? How can I get IPv6 via Tunnelbroker.net?

The answer is that yes, you most certainly can get IPv6 from Tunnelbroker.net.

The initial steps are basically identical to what I wrote in the other post..

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 configure your home network to use IPv6…

3. Obtain the instructions for your operating system

This next part is going to be different for each of you depending upon what operating system you are using and even what device you are connecting the tunnel to. If you are just connecting a single computer inside of your home network, you can just perform the operations here from that one computer. If you are going to going to connect from whatever router or gateway you have on the edge of your network and then do routing for the devices on the inside of the network… well… you may or may not have to do a bit more work.

Regardless, the folks at Hurricane Electric provide this nice, handy drop-down menu at the bottom of your list of tunnels:

Choose an option and you’ll see what you need to do. For instance, here was one set of Linux instructions for one of my tunnels:

With those instructions you should be able to get up and going with IPv6. If the instructions don’t work for you, I’ve found the Tunnelbroker forums to be a great resource as well.

Two Critical Caveats

As I wrote about in the earlier article in more detail, there are two important things to think about with using this setup:

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

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

Please refer to my earlier article for more details, but these are critical issues to be aware of when setting up your home network.

In The End…

If you’ve done all of this, you should now have IPv6 connectivity on your home network (or single machine). A simple test is to try out these sites:

• http://www.ipv6-test.com/ – will give you a full report on your IPv6 and IPv4 connections
• http://www.kame.net/ – the turtle will dance if you have IPv6, and will be still if you don’t.

If you have IPv6 working, you can then go check out Google, Facebook, Netflix, CNN or any of the many other sites now offering IPv6 connectivity.

Enjoy!

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!

Last week at VoiceCon Orlando 2010 I had a great time giving a 3-hour tutorial on the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP). Over 200 people attended and made it a very interactive session with lots of great questions and comments. The abstract for this session was:

SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) has become the dominant protocol for IP communications. This workshop explains SIP — how it works, the major issues impacting deployments and how SIP will evolve in the future.

The session focuses on the technical aspects of SIP and how it is used. It analyzes in detail the major components of SIP architecture, SIP addressing and registration, session establishment, SIP message routing and connecting SIP across the PSTN. You will learn about SIP extensions and how SIMPLE works for IM/presence. The workshop also examines some of the challenges SIP faces, including NAT traversal (and the tools developed to cope with it: STUN, TURN and ICE) and security. The tutorial concludes with an assessment of how SIP may evolve and its role in peer-to-peer environments. You will receive an inventory of SIP resources—books, papers and organizations.

The slides from the session are available at SlideShare and embedded below – I do want to note that my slides were based on a presentation that David Bryan originally created (and are used with his permission). David has taught this tutorial in the past, but was out at IETF 77 last week as a Working Group chair. I built off of David’s slides, added a good number of network diagrams, tweaked a bunch of his text, changed/modified/deleted slides and generally made it into the presentation I gave.

Enjoy the presentation…

Want to learn about the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP)? Would you like to understand how the SIP protocol works and why it is the dominant open standard for communication today? Want to understand the challenges SIP faces and what’s being done to overcome them?

If so… and if you will be attending VoiceCon in Orlando, FL, March 22-25, you’ll be able to join my (Dan York) 3-hour tutorial on “SIP Fundamentals and Prospects” on Tuesday, March 23rd, from 2-5pm. The abstract VoiceCon has posted is this:

SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) has become the dominant protocol for IP communications. This workshop explains SIP — how it works, the major issues impacting deployments and how SIP will evolve in the future.

The session focuses on the technical aspects of SIP and how it is used. It analyzes in detail the major components of SIP architecture, SIP addressing and registration, session establishment, SIP message routing and connecting SIP across the PSTN. You will learn about SIP extensions and how SIMPLE works for IM/presence. The workshop also examines some of the challenges SIP faces, including NAT traversal (and the tools developed to cope with it: STUN, TURN and ICE) and security. The tutorial concludes with an assessment of how SIP may evolve and its role in peer-to-peer environments. You will receive an inventory of SIP resources—books, papers and organizations.

I’m very much looking forward to the session… although I still do have some work to finish up on the materials. For the past while my friend David Bryan has given these tutorials at VoiceCon events, but given that he also chairs IETF working groups he would need to clone himself since this VoiceCon is the same week as IETF 77 in Anaheim, California. It’s a wee bit hard to flip between coasts… and as anyone who has ever been to an IETF event knows, the meetings are intense and he is needed out there.

If you can’t attend VoiceCon this year, I’ll probably do some SIP tutorial webinars in the future and perhaps you’ll see something popping up over at Voxeo University… stay tuned. And if you are at VoiceCon, please do stop by and say hello… or send me an email in advance letting me know.

Over at Ars Technica, author Gilad Shaham has started a series of posts about the SIP protocol. So far the two installments are:

• Wired for sound: how SIP won the VoIP protocol wars
• VoIP in-depth: An introduction to the SIP protocol, Part 1

The first article gives some background about SIP and goes on to explain how SIP prevailed over H.323 as the dominant standard for VoIP traffic today. The second article goes through the details of basic SIP messaging and explains how SIP proxy servers and registrars fit into the picture, complete with some diagrams that nicely explain call flows. The author indicates that the next article in the series will dive into SIP calls in more detail.

If you are new to VoIP or to the SIP protocol, both of these articles are great tutorials that will help you learn more about what SIP is all about. If you are familiar with SIP, you still may find some interesting tidbits mixed into the text. The articles are good to see and I’m looking forward to reading the next installments!

Recently we came across a great series of articles at InformIT on the subject of VoiceXML. Written by Frank Coyne, they cover the range from an introduction to VoiceXML up through using VoiceXML with social networks. Nicely, the author mentions Voxeo and talks about how the exercises he lays out can be done using a free developer account on our evolution.voxeo.com site. Here are the articles:

• “An Introduction to VoiceXML“
• “Part 2: Working with Forms“
• “Part 3: VoiceXML Grammars“
• “Part 4: Grammars, Scope and Event Handlers“
• “Part 5: VoiceXML meets Web 2.0“

You can also get a list of all the articles as well as a blog entry from Frank Coyne back in August titled “Mashin’ Up with Voice XML“. To probably no one’s surprise, I was personally most intrigued by Part 5. Having done a ton of work with XSLT stylesheets in the past I enjoyed the part about creating dynamic Voice XML using XSLT stylesheets to generate the VoiceXML:

http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=1017851&seqNum=6

Linking VoiceXML to triggering Gmail delivery is also quite cool:

http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=1017851&seqNum=8

As I am personally just coming up to speed on VoiceXML, I’ll be working through many of these tutorials in my own evolution account. (Since accounts are free, you are welcome to sign up and check it out yourself.)

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