One-liner to check (and ping6) IPv6 devices

A one-line to check IPv6 devices on your LAN:

$ ping6 -c3 -I wlan0 ff02::1 | awk ' /bytes from/ { print $4 }' | sort -u | sed 's/:$//'

fe80::1af4:6aff:fe9c:ced4
fe80::212:40ff:fe8a:8e38
fe80::66d1:a3ff:fe31:9c57
fe80::c24a:ff:fe2c:dcbc
fe80::d263:b4ff:fe00:2a61

So: 5 IPv6-enabled devices on my LAN. At least: 5 devices that react on the broadcast ping6.


You can feed that into ping6 to see if they are ping6-able:

$ ping6 -c3 -I wlan0 ff02::1 | awk ' /bytes from/ { print $4 }' | sort -u | sed 's/:$//' | awk '{ print "ping6 -c3 -I wlan0 " $1 }'  | /bin/sh | awk ' /PING/ { print $2 } /packets transmitted/ { print $0 "\n" }  '  

fe80::1af4:6aff:fe9c:ced4(fe80::1af4:6aff:fe9c:ced4)
3 packets transmitted, 3 received, 0% packet loss, time 2000ms

fe80::212:40ff:fe8a:8e38(fe80::212:40ff:fe8a:8e38)
3 packets transmitted, 3 received, 0% packet loss, time 2004ms

fe80::66d1:a3ff:fe31:9c57(fe80::66d1:a3ff:fe31:9c57)
3 packets transmitted, 3 received, 0% packet loss, time 2002ms

fe80::c24a:ff:fe2c:dcbc(fe80::c24a:ff:fe2c:dcbc)
3 packets transmitted, 3 received, 0% packet loss, time 2004ms

fe80::d263:b4ff:fe00:2a61(fe80::d263:b4ff:fe00:2a61)
3 packets transmitted, 3 received, 0% packet loss, time 2002ms

So ... they are all ping6-able.

Discover IPv6 enabled devices on your LAN

pi@raspevaq ~ $ ping6 -c4  -I eth0 ff02::1 | awk '{ print $4 }' | grep fe80 | sed -e 's/:$//' | sort -u

fe80::1af4:6aff:fe9c:ced4
fe80::212:40ff:fe8a:8e38
fe80::ba27:ebff:fef2:b330

pi@raspevaq ~ $

Dutch ISP Telfort ends its IPv6 offering

Ouch: It's 2014 and Dutch ISP ends its IPv6 service to its customers.

Telfort started an IPv6 pilot in December 2011 (see my blog post) and offered opt-in IPv6 to all its customers as of March 2013 (see my blog post). And all that ended yesterday, July 28, 2014.

As the reason for ending the IPv6 pilot, Telfort says it's moving to a new datacenter.

Telfort offers no clear plans for re-introduction of IPv6: Telfort refers to its dependency on mother company KPN, which does not offer IPv6 to consumer customers.

So: one step back for IPv6 and Telfort.

Testing IPv6-only on Ubuntu

A nice try, just for fun: how is the Internet behaving with IPv6-only on a Ubuntu system?

Before we start: I think IPv4 will be in use for at least 10 years, together with IPv6. So IPv6-only is just a test.

Pre-condition: your IPv6 must be working. Check with

ping6 -c4 ipv6.google.com

Two steps to remove IPv4:

First
sudo gedit /etc/resolv.conf
and put this before the existing nameserver entry:

nameserver 2001:4860:4860::8888
nameserver 2001:4860:4860::8844

Then remove your IPv4 address, in my case 192.168.1.113 from wlan0:

sudo ip addr del 192.168.1.113/24 dev wlan0

You now only have IPv6. (Don't worry: after a network reload, you have your IPv4 back)

Check that IPv4 is not working anymore:

$ ping 8.8.8.8
connect: Network is unreachable

Check that IPv6 is still working:

ping6 -c4 ipv6.google.com

With your webbrowser, visit (which should all work):

• http://ipv6.test-ipv6.com/ , which should say "No IPv4 address detected"
• https://www.google.com/
• https://www.youtube.com/
• https://gmail.com/
• https://www.facebook.com/
• https://www.xs4all.nl/

Not working (shame on them!):

• https://twitter.com/
• http://netflix.com/
• http://bing.com/
• https://duckduckgo.com/
• http://www.nu.nl/

You can visit an IPv4-only site like nu.nl via http://www.nu.nl.ipv6.sixxs.org/ . Note that this only work for plain HTTP, not for HTTPS.

If you run

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade

you will get messages like:

Could not resolve 'ppa.launchpad.net'
E: Unable to fetch some archives, maybe run apt-get update or try with --fix-missing?

Pity.

Back to dual stack IPv4 and IPv6? Just reload your network.

TP-Link 3600 and 6to4 based IPv6

TP-Link 3600 and IPv6

I just bought a TP-Link 3600 router (formal name: TL-WDR3600). Quite a nice router: good Wifi (80/80 Mbps), almost linespeed (router achieves 380/380 Mbps, so not completely reaching my 420/420 Mbps linespeed). Nice configuration features. And all that for only 45 Euro's.

The Dutch product information says it supports 6RD, which ... it does not. So the router can't use Hurricane Electric.
However, it does support IPv6 via DHCPv6, Static IPv6, PPPoEv6 and 6to4.

As my ISP does not support IPv6, I tried 6to4, and ... it works quite well. The results are below

Results

IPv6 Addressing

On the LAN side, the TP-Link 3600 provides SLAAC. The resulting addresses are:

Raspi with Raspbian:
MAC address: b8:27:eb:96:c4:2f
IPv6 address: 2002:3e2d:7722:1:ba27:ebff:fe96:c42f (MAC-based with the u-bit set, aka EUI-64)

Laptop with Ubuntu, with IPv6 privacy extensions activated:
MAC address: 18:f4:6a:9c:ce:d4
IPv6 addresses:
2002:3e2d:7722:1:545f:6a47:e629:cce (privacy extension)
2002:3e2d:7722:1:1af4:6aff:fe9c:ced4 (MAC-based with the u-bit set, aka EUI-64)

So the format of the IPv6 addresses is:
2002:::

In other words, the scheme from http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19683-01/817-0573/iptm-ip6-trans-1/index.html is followed:

IPv6 Speed

A poor man's IPv6 speedtest, ie

wget -6 'http://ftp.belnet.be/ubuntu.com/ubuntu/releases/precise/ubuntu-12.04.4-desktop-i386.iso' -O /dev/null 

results in a mean speed of 7,07 MB/s, so about 70 MBps IPv6.

A "ping6 ipv6.google.com" results in a mean ping time of 6.8 ms

Not bad at all

IPv6 Connectivity

From the public IPv6 Internet, all IPv6 devices are reachable on all their ports. I like it that way. Some people prefer a default-drop behaviour, which I could not find in the router's settings.

Within the LAN, things works as expected: a direct connection between IPv6 enabled devices.

Conclusion

The TP-Link 3600's IPv6 over 6to4 works quite well. I'll leave the feature activated.

Details

Hardware and firmware version

Tests run on WDR3600 v1 with Firmware Version: 3.13.34 Build 130909 Rel.53148n

IPv6 configuration screen

Ubuntu with Netflix, over IPv6

Some cool technology to share:

Ubuntu 14.04, with Netflix (using pipelight), which is using IPv6 (see terminal on the right).

Hurricane Electric can handle dynamic IPv4 addresses

My ISP loves to give me a new IPv4 address each few days. Until now I used Hurricane Electric's website to update my IPv6 tunnel endpoint accordingly to get my IPv6 working again. I just discovered you can update your tunnel in another way:

curl -s 'https://myname:verysecret@ipv4.tunnelbroker.net/nic/update?hostname=123456'

You have to run this from a machine on your LAN

I created a script like this

date >> /var/log/tunnelbroker.log
curl -s 'https://myname:verysecret@ipv4.tunnelbroker.net/nic/update?hostname=123456' >> /var/log/tunnelbroker.log

and put it into my crontab. Problem solved!

Thanks to the Tunnelbroker FAQ:

My IPv4 endpoint address is dynamic. Can I still create a tunnel? If yes, what do I need to do when my IP address changes?

Yes, you can still create a tunnel even if you are using a dynamic IPv4 endpoint address. If your IPv4 endpoint address changes, you can either login to the tunnelbroker.net page and update your IPv4 endpoint address or use https://ipv4.tunnelbroker.net/nic/update which is designed to be used to update your IPv4 endpoint address.