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This is the first article of an IPv6 blog I have maintained for a few months elsewhere. I am transferring them to Dreamwidth now.
In a small scale, I am a bit of an IPv6 evangelist. At my employer's the networking group is pushing the introduction of IPv6, and I am happy to follow. They have already introduced IPv6 for the dedicated server customers, which is good. The shared web hosting, where I work, is working on it, slowly.
My home network is fully IPv6-capable, although not all devices can speak it. Most unfortunately not the Cisco 861 router, which I bought particularly because I thought it could, from information on the Cisco website (which has been corrected in between). So now my IPv6 border router is an old WRT54G that happened to be around, running OpenWRT, which is less stable and less well documented than I would like.
The mainstream home router manufacturers have not yet jumped the boat. AVM claims to be ready (see fix6.net), but waiting for the ISPs. D-Link has the DIR-825, but judging from the manual it is apparently only able to have one flat /64 network on the inside, which is not enough for me. (I have the WLAN on a separate network, so I can have it more closed than the core network.)
There is the Cisco 871, which is what I really want feature-wise, but it is a bit expensive, and I think IOS is too arcane if you don't deal with it on an everyday basis. I'd rather have a mainstream device with a point-and-click configuration tool, and cheaper, too. But apparently there is none yet, so I'll probably get an 871 from eBay or so. Or an 831, which is much cheaper, but limited to 10 Mbps on the WAN interface, so not really enough for 16 Mbps ADSL. (I have only 6 Mbps at the moment, but I have been toying with the idea of 16 Mbps for a while, mostly for the faster uplink -- 1 Mbps instead of the 512 kbps I have now.)
My infrastructure uses the domain w21.org, and I am a little proud that I even have v6 glue records for my v6 nameservers in the .org zone. Try
to see it. I had to make my registrar (Schlund Technologies) do it by hand because their customer service web interface is (or at least was) not yet able to handle IPv6. At all.
My current IPv6 ISP is rh-tec, who offer IPv6 Internet access over T-DSL (Deutsche Telekom) for free up to a volume of 3000 MB per month, including a /48. That is great! Less great is their interface for reverse DNS for the IPv6 addresses. I have not yet succeeded in making it accept anything, let alone a delegation for the /48, and an e-mail support request I made end of last year has not yet been answered.
With Titan Networks I had reverse DNS for my /48 delegated to me, which was fine. I made my sage certificate from HE when I used v6 with them. But they did not allow me to use v4 and v6 in two different PPPoE sessions for the same account. Of course I need two different sessions if I use a different router for each protocol. This restriction was not enforced in the beginning, so I didn't know of it initially, and learned it only after asking because my v6 and v4 connectivity had been extremely flaky for days. A question via e-mail if they could offer me any solution (like, for instance, two accounts for the two sessions) was not answered.
So I thought, I could well use another, cheaper ISP for v4 and a fixed IP address (which is not that exotic any more) and no v6 either, and found ligado. But apparently they do not offer reverse DNS even for the one IPv4 address, which makes it not really interesting. I'll have to find that out.
Rh-tec may not be willing to put much effort into reverse DNS for their freebie offer, which I could understand. But I'd rather pay for something that is actually useful. Today I found KGT new media, who have not only an IPv6 offer, but other than rh-tec also a v4 tariff that fits private home users. Both together are even cheaper than what I have from Titan. But no mention of reverse DNS either. I'll have to call them, I guess; the success rate of my e-mail inquiries has been less than satisfactory lately.
In a small scale, I am a bit of an IPv6 evangelist. At my employer's the networking group is pushing the introduction of IPv6, and I am happy to follow. They have already introduced IPv6 for the dedicated server customers, which is good. The shared web hosting, where I work, is working on it, slowly.
My home network is fully IPv6-capable, although not all devices can speak it. Most unfortunately not the Cisco 861 router, which I bought particularly because I thought it could, from information on the Cisco website (which has been corrected in between). So now my IPv6 border router is an old WRT54G that happened to be around, running OpenWRT, which is less stable and less well documented than I would like.
The mainstream home router manufacturers have not yet jumped the boat. AVM claims to be ready (see fix6.net), but waiting for the ISPs. D-Link has the DIR-825, but judging from the manual it is apparently only able to have one flat /64 network on the inside, which is not enough for me. (I have the WLAN on a separate network, so I can have it more closed than the core network.)
There is the Cisco 871, which is what I really want feature-wise, but it is a bit expensive, and I think IOS is too arcane if you don't deal with it on an everyday basis. I'd rather have a mainstream device with a point-and-click configuration tool, and cheaper, too. But apparently there is none yet, so I'll probably get an 871 from eBay or so. Or an 831, which is much cheaper, but limited to 10 Mbps on the WAN interface, so not really enough for 16 Mbps ADSL. (I have only 6 Mbps at the moment, but I have been toying with the idea of 16 Mbps for a while, mostly for the faster uplink -- 1 Mbps instead of the 512 kbps I have now.)
My infrastructure uses the domain w21.org, and I am a little proud that I even have v6 glue records for my v6 nameservers in the .org zone. Try
host -a w21.org a2.org.afilias-nst.info.to see it. I had to make my registrar (Schlund Technologies) do it by hand because their customer service web interface is (or at least was) not yet able to handle IPv6. At all.
My current IPv6 ISP is rh-tec, who offer IPv6 Internet access over T-DSL (Deutsche Telekom) for free up to a volume of 3000 MB per month, including a /48. That is great! Less great is their interface for reverse DNS for the IPv6 addresses. I have not yet succeeded in making it accept anything, let alone a delegation for the /48, and an e-mail support request I made end of last year has not yet been answered.
With Titan Networks I had reverse DNS for my /48 delegated to me, which was fine. I made my sage certificate from HE when I used v6 with them. But they did not allow me to use v4 and v6 in two different PPPoE sessions for the same account. Of course I need two different sessions if I use a different router for each protocol. This restriction was not enforced in the beginning, so I didn't know of it initially, and learned it only after asking because my v6 and v4 connectivity had been extremely flaky for days. A question via e-mail if they could offer me any solution (like, for instance, two accounts for the two sessions) was not answered.
So I thought, I could well use another, cheaper ISP for v4 and a fixed IP address (which is not that exotic any more) and no v6 either, and found ligado. But apparently they do not offer reverse DNS even for the one IPv4 address, which makes it not really interesting. I'll have to find that out.
Rh-tec may not be willing to put much effort into reverse DNS for their freebie offer, which I could understand. But I'd rather pay for something that is actually useful. Today I found KGT new media, who have not only an IPv6 offer, but other than rh-tec also a v4 tariff that fits private home users. Both together are even cheaper than what I have from Titan. But no mention of reverse DNS either. I'll have to call them, I guess; the success rate of my e-mail inquiries has been less than satisfactory lately.