IPv6 Ideas

[Matthew Jakeman]

Nathan Lay wrote:
> I started playing with IPv6 on my home network with the intent to 
> transition over.  While many things work quite well, IPv6 technology 
> in general still seems to have some rough edges.
>
> In terms of FreeBSD support, rtadvd and rtsol do not yet support 
> (easily? -O option in rtadvd/rtsold) RFC5006 (Router Advertisements 
> Option for DNS Configuration) which make it inconvenient to use mobile 
> devices (like laptops) on an IPv6 network.  I haven't had much luck 
> with net/radvd.

What are your problems with using radvd? I have used it quite a bit on 
FreeBSD (6.1) without any hassle. It's even written quite nicely in my 
experience so working on patches for it should be quite do-able if there 
are features missing.

> Is this something that could be improved?  I'd be willing to implement 
> this support, but I have very little time to spare (writing thesis).
>
> To be backward compatible with IPv4, I had a look at faith and faithd 
> and while these tools are ingenius, I don't think they are good enough 
> for transitioning to IPv6.  I imagine it is possible to write an 
> IPv6->IPv4 NAT daemon that uses faith to capture and restructure 
> IPv6/IPv4 packets.  Though, it really seems like this is the 
> firewall's job
>
> A pf rule like:
>
> nat on $inet4_if inet to any from $lan_if:network6 -> ($inet4_if)
>
> would be extremely convenient.  I'm aware pf doesn't support the token 
> :network6 ... its just a wishful example.  The IPv6 mapped IPv4 
> addresses would be the standard ::ffff:0:0/96 prefix.  I imagine that 
> this is very difficult to implement but I don't see why it wouldn't be 
> possible.  If a firewall supported this kind of NAT, a home network 
> could easily deploy IPv6 and be backward compatible.  Well, not quite, 
> I guess BIND would have to serve IPv6 mapped IPv4 addresses to IPv6 
> queries.
>
> Oh yeah, one annoyance on 7-STABLE, it seems like pf is started before 
> IPv6 rc.conf options are processed (including IPv6 address assignment) 
> breaking inet6 rules that involve $if:network.
>
> Comments?
>
> Other than that, this has been one hell of a fun experience.
>
> Best Regards,
> Nathan Lay
>
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