techblog 

With the impending exhaustion of IPV4 address space (currently predicted as 17 Oct 2011 http://www.potaroo.net/tools/ipv4/index.html ) it seems every networking event these days has coverage of ipv6, which can only be a good thing I guess. So yesterday while at uknof I discovered that google are now running an ipv6 only version of their website at ipv6.google.com which made me wonder how easy it is to get ipv6 up and running on a personal laptop/desktop.

Now I normally reserve the ‘It Just Works’ phrase for Mac OSX however today I felt the need to apply it to ipv6 or more specifically an ipv6 technology which I have only recently become aware of called Teredo. This enables you to tunnel ipv6 traffic through a NAT over ipv4. In simplistic terms it encapsulates all your ipv6 packets inside ipv4 UDP packets and sends them to a Teredo Server/Relay which then strips the ipv6 back out and forwards it to the ipv6 only internet (further technical detail available at references listed at the end of this article)

The real plus point of this approach though is how easy it is to configure on the client:

OSX- Download and install the client here: http://www.deepdarc.com/miredo-osx/
Linux- Download compile and install the client here: http://www.remlab.net/miredo/
Windows XP SP2 and above- Run two commands at a dos prompt
‘netsh interface ipv6 install’
‘netsh interface ipv6 set teredo client’

You’re done.

To check your ipv6 is working try accessing http://ipv6.google.com or do a traceroute6 (tracert6 for windows) to 2001:7fd::1 which is the ipv6 address for the K Root DNS server.

Ok so it’s not native ipv6 but it does give you some basic understanding and experience.

As I understand it the ease of use and installation under Windows is explained by the fact this was originally a Microsoft invention.

More technical details are available at the following links

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/network/ipv6/teredo.mspx
http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc4380.txt

Additional Security note:

Potential users and in particular network security admins should be aware that running a teredo tunnel opens a publicly routed ipv6 address on the machine in question. It maybe wise to configure firewalls to block this behavior behind corporate networks.

We had some issues in getting an MS SCOM 2007 (formerly Microsoft Operations Manager) install up and running this week. This product has a fairly heavy set of pre-requisites before it will install and amongst these is asp.net. Try as we could myself and a fellow sysadmin could not get the install to recognise that asp.net (which is included in the .net framework) was installed. Luckily after a little search I stumbled upon MS KB article 934759 (http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=934759) which states that this problem can occur if you install IIS after the .net framework as asp.net does not then get registered in the IIS metabase, it goes on to recommend that you run the ASPNet_RegIIS.exe command to register asp.net, however this command seems to be 32 bit only and would not run on our 64 bit installation of Windows, the only options were to modify the IIS metabase manually or re-install from scratch, in the interests of application stability we opted for the latter, when we then ensured that IIS was added before the .net framework the SCOM 2007 went through without any issues.