January 13, 2000 (Check here for the latest version.)
Actually, the best way to connect to the 6bone is to configure 6to4 and use MSR's 6to4 relay router. See our 6to4 documentation.
Another approach is to use a "tunnel broker" service. The tunnel broker will create a tunnel for you and give you a script that automates your configuration. See www.freenet6.net.
Using either 6to4 or a tunnel broker, you can ping other machines on the 6bone. For example,
ping6 6bone-gw.ipv6.sics.se
ping6 sipper.ipv6.zk3-x.dec.com
ping6 www.6bone.net
ping6 carmen.ipv6.cselt.it
ping6 ipv6.research.microsoft.com
Note that many 6bone sites may be inaccessible. The 6bone is
notoriously flaky. If you experience connectivity problems, the
tracert6 -d
command may be helpful. (The -d
argument says not to perform reverse-DNS lookup on the resulting
addresses.) Report problems with 6bone connectivity to the 6bone
mailing list, 6bone@isi.edu.
If you want to connect to the 6bone the hard way, the first thing you need is for someone already on the 6bone to setup a tunnel for you. You need to find a contact person for a 6bone site topologically near you, and ask them. The only way I know to do this is by perusing the 6bone registry. See http://www.6bone.net/6bone_hookup.html and ftp://whois.6bone.net/6bone/6bone.db.gz. If you do connect to the 6bone, then you should create the appropriate entries in the 6bone registry to describe your connection. See http://www.6bone.net/RIPE-registry.html.
Once you have a tunnel, there are three things you will know:
So to make this concrete, we have a machine connected to the 6bone via NWNET. I am using the following values:
192.220.249.249
- the IPv4 address of the machine at NWNET.131.107.65.121
- the IPv4 address of my 6bone machine here
at Microsoft Research.3ffe:a00:6::/48
- the address prefix assigned to Microsoft Research
by NWNET.(Note if you tried to use these values, you could set up a tunnel to NWNET, but they wouldn't have a tunnel back to you and so it wouldn't work. You need to get your own values from your own 6bone contact.)
From the address prefix, you derive an IPv6 address to assign to
your machine. It's pretty much up to you how you do that, but I
like to use the IPv4 address as the interface identifier for
tunnels. So continuing the example, my IPv6 address is
3ffe:a00:6::131.107.65.121
, which can also be written as
3ffe:a00:6::836b:4179
.
Once you have these values, you can use the ipv6.exe command to create a configured tunnel and connect to the 6bone. This requires two commands:
ipv6 rtu ::/0 2/::192.220.249.249 pub life 1800
The ipv6 rtu
command performs a routing table update operation. It can be used to add, remove, or update a route. In this case it is establishing a default route to the 6bone.
The ::/0
argument is the route's prefix - the zero-length prefix means it is a default route.
The 2/::192.220.249.249
argument specifies the
next-hop neighbor for this prefix. It says to forward packets that
match the prefix to address ::192.220.249.249
using
interface #2. Interface #2 is the "pseudo-interface" used for
configured and automatic tunneling. Forwarding a packet to
::192.220.249.249
causes it to be encapsulated with a v4
header and sent to 192.220.249.249
.
The pub
argument makes this a published route. This is
only relevant for routers, so unless/until routing is enabled it has
no effect. Similarly, the 30 minute lifetime is only relevant if
routing is enabled.
ipv6 adu 2/3ffe:a00:6::131.107.65.121
The ipv6 adu
command performs an address update operation. It can be used to add, remove, or update an address on an interface. In this case it is configuring the machine's 6bone address.
The 2/3ffe:a00:6::131.107.65.121
argument specifies the interface and the address. It says to configure address 3ffe:a00:6::131.107.65.121
on interface #2.
To verify that these commands had the desired effect, try ipv6 if 2
to examine the addresses assigned to interface #2, and try ipv6 rt
to examine the routing table.
See our configuration documentation for more information about ipv6.exe.