IPv6 Update

February 3rd, 2011 by

As you may be aware there’s been a flurry of IPv6 related excitement in the past few days. IANA has allocated the last of the IPv4 address space to the regional registries. This means that obtaining IP addresses is going to become steadily more difficult from here and attempting to migrate the whole Internet to IPv6 is looking like more of an immediate priority.

We’ve been running an IPv6 network for over six months, yesterday we enabled IPv6 on two of our customer facing hosting servers, yali.mythic-beasts.com and onza.mythic-beasts.com. We also made their control panels and all services hosted on them available over IPv6.

pete@ubuntu:~$ dig AAAA yali.mythic-beasts.com +short
2a00:1098:0:86:1000::10

Temporarily an automated scripted cleaned up the A record for the hosts disabling access to all the services over IPv4 to all of our customers that don’t have IPv6 connectivity. As our support mailqueue testified, the majority of our customers do not have working IPv6 connectivity yet.

Unrelated to this activity we also discovered that by default linux limits the number of ipv6 routes to 4096. You can update this by doing,

echo 32768 >/proc/sys/net/ipv6/route/max_size

this is a good idea on any linux machine that sees the full routing table, the IPv6 routing table is now about 4300 routes.

Posted in Misc