Gentoo IPv6 Router Guide

1.  Preliminaries

Basic Kernel Configuration

Any of the 2.6 kernel trees availables in Gentoo will easily support IPv6 connections. The new USAGI IPv6 stack is integrated to the kernel since Linux 2.6.0.

# emerge gentoo-sources

Now we are ready to enter the kernel source directory and begin our actual kernel configuration.

# cd /usr/src/linux
# make menuconfig

Networking support --->
  Networking options --->
    <*> The IPv6 protocol --->
(The IPv6 options beneath this one can be useful for many other applications,
but should not be needed for a basic setup)

(This option is only required if you are using ptrtd for 6to4 conversion)
Device Drivers --->
  Network device support --->
    <*> Universal TUN/TAP device driver support

Testing IPv6 Support

After enabling the recommended options, recompile your kernel and reboot into your new IPv6-enabled kernel.

If you don't already have iproute2 installed, we urge you to do it now. iproute2 is a network configuration suite that contains ip, the famous replacement for ifconfig, route, iptunnel and others...

# emerge sys-apps/iproute2

If IPv6 is working, the loopback device should show an IPv6 address:

# ip -6 addr show lo
1: lo: <LOOPBACK,UP> mtu 16436
    inet6 ::1/128 scope host 
       valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever
    (The above lines show things are working)

Before going any further, make sure that you add ipv6 to your list of USE variables in make.conf, so that future emerges of packages will include IPv6 support.

2.  Tunnel Configuration

Basic Configuration

Most ISPs still do not offer any native IPv6 connections. To get around this limitation, there are several "tunnel brokers" around the globe that offer free IPv6 tunnels. This will allow you to tunnel all your IPv6 connections through an IPv4 connection.

Below are two examples for setting up a tunnel with two popular North American tunnels, Hurricane Electric (applies for non-heartbeat tunnels from sixxs.net as well) and Freenet6.

Hurricane Electric

Hurricane Electric (HE for short) offers free IPv6 tunnels and allocates a /64 block of addresses for you. It also allows configuration of reverse DNS. Getting a tunnel from HE is as easy as going to http://www.tunnelbroker.net/ and filling out a one page form.

After you have a tunnel approved and have a /64 block allocated, you can configure your Gentoo box. HE provides sample configurations based on ifconfig and the iproute utilities. The following two examples assume you have the following configuration:

Using the iproute2 package and the ip command, you would do the following:

(Create a tunnel between the local (eth0) IPv4 and HE's remote IPv4 address)
# ip tunnel add sixbone mode sit remote 64.71.128.82 local 68.36.91.195 ttl 64 dev eth0
(Extract the tunneling overhead from the MTU)
# ip link set sixbone mtu 1280
(Bring the tunnel up)
# ip link set sixbone up
(Assign the IPv6 address to it)
# ip addr add 2001:470:1F00:FFFF::189 dev sixbone
(Route all global unicast IPv6 addresses through our 'sixbone' tunnel device)
# ip route add 2000::/3 dev sixbone

Freenet6

Freenet6 is another free tunnel broker. Optional registration only requires a username and a valid email address. They have chosen to turn the tunnel management into a client/server setup and have created the gateway6 client. The client is available in Portage. To install it do:

# emerge gateway6

Now if you chose to connect with authentification, you need to configure gateway6 by editing /etc/gateway6/gw6c.conf. You should only have to change the userid and passwd fields to match those assigned from Freenet6 and change the gateway server. Below is a sample config file.

auth_method=any
userid=anonymous
passwd=foobar
template=linux
server=broker.freenet6.net

Testing your connection

Now that your tunnel is configured, you can test your connection. The easiest way to do this is to use the ping6 utility and try to ping an IPv6 host.

# emerge iputils
# ping6 www.kame.net
PING www.kame.net(orange.kame.net) 56 data bytes
64 bytes from orange.kame.net: icmp_seq=1 ttl=52 time=290 ms
64 bytes from orange.kame.net: icmp_seq=2 ttl=52 time=277 ms
64 bytes from orange.kame.net: icmp_seq=3 ttl=52 time=280 ms
64 bytes from orange.kame.net: icmp_seq=4 ttl=52 time=279 ms
64 bytes from orange.kame.net: icmp_seq=5 ttl=52 time=277 ms

--- www.kame.net ping statistics ---
5 packets transmitted, 5 received, 0% packet loss, time 4038ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 277.040/281.041/290.046/4.699 ms

Further work is currently in progress to add better IPv6 support to the network init scripts. If you'd like to know the status of this and/or help out, email latexer@gentoo.org.

3.  IPv6 Support in Applications

Re-emerging packages

Unless you had USE="ipv6" in your /etc/portage/make.conf previously, you probably need to re-emerge a bunch of packages to compile in IPv6 support for them. To get a list of all the installed packages which are affected by USE flag changes, use Portage's --newuse (-N) option:

# emerge -uDNav world

If you have changed a lot of USE flags, the list could be quite long. It's suggested to keep your system up-to-date, so it won't hurt if you recompile all affected packages.

IPv6 Specific Packages

There are a few packages which specifically deal with IPv6 items. Most of these are located in /usr/portage/net-misc.

4.  DNS setup

IPv6 and DNS

Just as DNS for IPv4 uses A records, DNS for IPv6 uses AAAA records. (This is because IPv4 is an address space of 2^32 while IPv6 is an address space of 2^128). For reverse DNS, the INT standard is deprecated but still widely supported. ARPA is the latest standard. Support for the ARPA format will be described here.

BIND configuration

Recent versions of BIND include excellent IPv6 support. This section will assume you have at least minimal knowledge about the configuration and use of BIND. We will assume you are not running bind in a chroot. If you are, simply append the chroot prefix to most of the paths in the following section.

First you need to add entries for both forward and reverse DNS zone files in /etc/bind/named.conf.

(We allow bind to listen to IPv6 addresses.
Using 'any' is the only way to do it prior to bind-9.3)
options {
    [...]
    listen-on-v6 { any; }
    [...]
};
(This will provide the forward DNS for the domain 'ipv6-rules.com':)
zone "ipv6-rules.com" IN {
    type master;
    file "pri/ipv6-rules.com";
};
(This format for reverse DNS is "bitwise." It's done by taking the IPv6 prefix,
reversing the order of the numbers and putting a period between each number)
zone "6.9.2.0.0.0.f.1.0.7.4.0.1.0.0.2.ip6.arpa" {
        type master;
        file "pri/rev-ipv6-rules.com.arpa";
};

Now we must create those zone files and add entries for all of our hosts:

$TTL    2h
@       IN      SOA     ipv6-rules.com. webmaster.ipv6-rules.com.  (
                                2003052501 ; Serial
                                28800      ; Refresh
                                14400      ; Retry
                                3600000    ; Expire
                                86400 )    ; Minimum
                NS      ns1.ipv6-rules.com

        IN      AAAA    2001:470:1f00:296::1 ; address for ipv6-rules.com
host1   IN      AAAA    2001:470:1f00:296::2 ; address for host1.ipv6-rules.com
host2   IN      AAAA    2001:470:1f00:296::3:3 ; address for host2.ipv6-rules.com

$TTL 3d ; Default TTL (bind 8 needs this, bind 9 ignores it)
@       IN SOA ipv6-rules.com. webmaster.ipv6-rules.com. (
                        2003052501      ; Serial number (YYYYMMdd)
                        24h             ; Refresh time
                        30m             ; Retry time
                        2d              ; Expire time
                        3d )            ; Default TTL
        IN      NS     ns1.ipv6-rules.com.
; IPv6 PTR entries
$ORIGIN 6.9.2.0.0.0.f.1.0.7.4.0.1.0.0.2.ip6.arpa.

1.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0 IN      PTR     ipv6-rules.com.
2.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0 IN      PTR     host1.ipv6-rules.com.
3.0.0.0.3.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0 IN      PTR     host2.ipv6-rules.com.

DJBDNS configuration

There are currently some third-party patches to DJBDNS available at http://www.fefe.de/dns/ that allow it to do IPv6 nameserving. DJBDNS can be installed with these patches by emerging it with ipv6 in your USE variables.

# emerge djbdns

After djbdns is installed, it can be setup by running tinydns-setup and answering a few questions about which IP addresses to bind to, where to install tinydns, etc.

# tinydns-setup

Assuming we've installed tinydns into /var/tinydns, we can now edit /var/tinydns/root/data. This file will contain all the data needed to get tinydns handling DNS for your IPv6 delegation.

(*.ipv6-rules.com is authoritatively handled by 192.168.0.1)
.ipv6-rules.com:192.168.0.1:a:259200
(Authoritative reverse DNS for 2001:470:1f00:296::/64)
.6.9.2.0.0.0.f.1.0.7.4.0.1.0.0.2.ip6.arpa:192.168.0.1:a
(Specify the IPs for host1 and host2)
6host1.ipv6-rules.com:200104701f0002960000000000000001:86400
6host2.ipv6-rules.com:200104701f0002960000000000000002:86400
(Point www to host1)
3www.ipv6-rules.com:200104701f0002960000000000000002:86400

Lines prefixed with a 6 will have both an AAAA and a PTR record created. Those prefixed with a 3 will only have an AAAA record created. Besides manually editing the data file, you can use the scripts add-host6 and add-alias6 to add new entries. After changes are made to the data file, you simply need to run make from /var/tinydns/root. This will create /var/tinydns/root/data.cfb, which tinydns will use as its source of information for DNS requests.

5.  IPv6 Router

Configure routing

Further configuration is required if we want to use our system as a router for other clients wishing to connect to the outside world with IPv6. We need to enable forwarding of IPv6 packets. We can do this in one of two ways.

# echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv6/conf/all/forwarding
or
# sysctl -w net.ipv6.conf.all.forwarding=1

To enable forwarding at boot, you'll need to edit /etc/sysctl.conf and add the following line.

(If you will be using radvd, this step is unnecessary)
net.ipv6.conf.default.forwarding=1

Traffic should now be forwarded from this box through the tunnel we've established with our broker.

To assign IPv6 addresses to clients, the IPv6 specification allows for both stateless and stateful IP assignment. Stateless assignment uses a process called Router Advertisement and allows clients to obtain an IP and a default route by simply bringing an interface up. It is called "stateless" because there is no record of IPs assigned and the host they are assigned to. Stateful assignment is handled by DHCPv6. It is "stateful" because the server keeps a state of the clients who've requested IPs and received them.

Stateless Configuration

Stateless configuration is easily accomplished using the Router Advertisement Daemon, or radvd.

# emerge radvd

After having emerged radvd, we need to create /etc/radvd/radvd.conf that contains information about what IP block to assign IPs from. Here is a sample radvd.conf file using the prefix we've been assigned from our tunnel broker.

interface eth1
{
        (Send advertisement messages to other hosts)
        AdvSendAdvert on;
        (Fragmentation is bad(tm))
        AdvLinkMTU 1280;
        MaxRtrAdvInterval 300;
        (IPv6 subnet prefix we've been assigned by our PoP)
        prefix 2001:470:1F00:296::/64
        {
                AdvOnLink on;
                AdvAutonomous on;
        };
};

Further information is available in man radvd.conf. We can now start radvd and set it to start at boot.

# /etc/init.d/radvd start
# rc-update add radvd default

Stateful Configuration

If you'd like to have stateful configuration, you'll need to install and configure net-misc/dibbler.

# emerge dibbler

Now we must configure the dibbler client by editing /etc/dibbler/client.conf.

iface ppp0 {
	rapid-commit yes
	pd
	option dns-server
}

We can now start the dibbler client, and configure it to start at boot.

# /etc/init.d/dibbler-client start
# rc-update add dibbler-client default

6.  IPv6 Clients

Using radvd

Clients behind this router should now be able to connect to the rest of the net via IPv6. If using radvd, configuring hosts should be as easy as bringing the interface up. (This is probably already done by your net.ethX init scripts).

# ip link set eth0 up
# ip addr show eth0
1: eth0: <BROADCAST,MULTICAST,UP> mtu 1400 qdisc pfifo_fast qlen 1000
    link/ether 00:01:03:2f:27:89 brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff
    inet6 2001:470:1f00:296:209:6bff:fe06:b7b4/128 scope global
       valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever
    inet6 fe80::209:6bff:fe06:b7b4/64 scope link
       valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever
    inet6 ff02::1/128 scope global
       valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever

7.  Other Resources

There are many excellent resources online pertaining to IPv6.

On IRC, you can try #ipv6 on Freenode. You can connect to the Freenode servers using an IPv6 enabled client by connecting to irc.ipv6.freenode.net.

The contents of this document, unless otherwise expressly stated, are licensed under the CC-BY-SA-2.5 license. The Gentoo Name and Logo Usage Guidelines apply.