Switching to IPv6?

[Jon Radel]

FreeBSD Questions wrote:
> I've been considering switching my home network to IPv6.  I have a
> computer acting as a firewall sitting between my ISP and my three LANs
> at home.  Of course, my DSL provider gives me an IPv4 address, and
> everything I want to access on the Internet is on an IPv4 network.
> The whole point is to learn to set up IPv6, to play with IPv6, and to
> become familiar with it, so when the day comes that the world actually
> uses IPv6 (ha ha) I'm ready, armed with knowledge.
> 

Have you considered going dual-stack, v4 and v6, and then getting a v6 
tunnel free from one of the tunnel brokers?  I'm doing that to ease 
myself into the v6 world, with, I suspect, considerably less pain than 
would be involved with v6 only.


> But the whole idea will go to pot if my firewall can't let my IPv6
> networks access my IPv4 Internet connection.  Does FreeBSD 7 provide
> such facilities as to allow access to an IPv4 network from an IPv6
> network?  What will my Vista, XP, and FreeBSD clients do if they only
> have an IPv6 address and I try to go to google.com or freebsd.org
> which are on IPv4 networks?

There have reportedly been problems with people turning on v6 on their 
stacks when their ISPs don't support it and then getting upset when they 
can no longer get to anything that has an AAAA record as well as an A. 
(Some browsers try v6 first and, at best, have to time out before they 
try v4.) That's probably the reason you have to use

ipv6.google.com

However, last I checked, www.freebsd.org worked just fine on the v6 
Internet.

So....bad examples.  :-)

However, unless you're making use of translation between v4 and v6, if 
you go v6 only you won't be talking to the v4 Internet at all.  Those A 
records just won't be of any use to your software.  See something like 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv6_translation_mechanisms for more.

--Jon Radel
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