Panickers guide to world ipv6 day

8th June 2011 is World IPv6 day. Maybe you haven't done anything about getting your website ipv6 enabled. Its taken the world 15 years to develop IPv6, so sure it seems *totally* reasonable that you can get it deployed in 10 days.

What I'm going to tell you about here will get basic IPv6 access to your site. It won't do it in a particularly pretty way, and its probably not the long term way to do it. Also I just hammered this out this afternoon (though its based on years of IPv6 use). (I hope) it should work.

First some DOs and DONTs:

* DON'T deploy IPv6 on your production servers. If you don't know much about IPv6, then blindly sticking it on your real production resources is probably a good way to put even your IPv4 (read: the real IP that everyone actually uses) connectivity at risk (for various reasons that you'll understand when you understand...)

* DO deploy a http proxy server on its own machine, and have that proxy your IPv6 traffic. You shouldn't need to modify *anything* on your production machines.

* DON'T put the IPv6 address record (AAAA, as opposed to the IPv4 A record) in your normal DNS. If you do, then users who have both IPv4 and IPv6 will usually try to connect over IPv6. You don't know how well this is going to scale, or how good your IPv6 connectivity is going to be (or even how good your users ipv6 connectivity is going to be, if everyone is going to be fucking around that day)

* DO put a DNS name (eg www.6.example.com, if your main site is on www.example.com) with the AAAA record. That way, users can choose to try using IPv6, and if its broken can easily get back to your main site. You'll need to publicise this, though, because its not going to get users connecting via IPv6 automatically, and at the same time you should provide some feedback: for example, an email address or a forum.


So what do you need to do:

* Get a dedicated server (either a physical hardware server, or a VPS) running a recent version of Linux. (Ubuntu 10.x would be enough)

* Connect that server to the ipv6 internet. If its on a network with native IPv6, then your host will probably give you connection details. If not, then use Hurricane Electric's free tunnel broker which will connect you over a regular internet connection.

* However you connect, you'll end up with an IPv6 address for your machine. It will be a string something like this 2001:470:1f09:1288::2 that you can get out of ifconfig(specifically, if you have a choice, choose the one that begins with a 2, not the one that begins with an f). Put that IPv6 address into an AAAA record in DNS (better hope your DNS hosting provider does AAAA records - the good ones do...) under a new DNS name. Don't put IPv4 addresses in there too. In my example, I'm going to configure:
blog.6.hawaga.org.uk AAAA 2001:470:1f09:1288::2

* Put apache httpd on your server, apt-get install apache2

* Now you'll need a client machine with IPv6 to try connecting to your new server. If you have a windows PC, you can probably turn on Teredo in the network configuration - it comes built in. On OS X, Linux or BSD, you can install miredo which is a Teredo client. Or you can set up another Hurricane Electric tunnel for your client machine. You can use test-ipv6.com to get a score for how well your new client machine is connected to the ipv6 internet.

* You should now be able to use a web browser to reach the hostname you configured in DNS back there - you should see apache's welcome/default page.

* Now, configure apache to forward all requests it receives onwards to your production website over IPv4. In the following example, my production IPv4 website is the one you are reading right now, benctechnicalblog.blogspot.com. Enable mod_proxy and mod_proxy_http, and then set up a virtual host directive like this (or put it in the base of your server config, seeing as this a host dedicated to forwarding ipv6 traffic):

<virtualHost *:80>
  ServerName blog.6.hawaga.org.uk
  ProxyPass / http://benctechnicalblog.blogspot.com/
  <Proxy http://benctechnicalblog.blogspot.com/>
    Allow from All
  </Proxy>
</virtualhost>

Once you've done that, visiting your ipv6 hostname (eg blog.6.hawaga.org.uk) should serve you the content of your real production website website.

Now publish the new hostname in a news item and make it seem like you know what you're doing...

Some stuff will not work, for sure: if you have anything that does things based on IPv4 address of client, that's all going to be based on the address of the proxy machine, not the real client IPv6 address. Things that might affect are localisation (eg language), and rate/load limiting based on ip address.

So, please ask questions in the comments and I'll see about answering them...