IPv6 Network Administration

Enabling, Testing, and Troubleshooting

In this section we'll go through the particular steps required to enable and test IPv6 on a host, including showing tables of the relevant commands.

On some systems, IPv6-aware utilities are shipped with a suffix of "6," so ping becomes ping6 and so on. On others systems, IPv6 operation is selected based on the name/address given. If you give a name that has both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses associated with it then there is usually a flag to allow you to explicitly select which protocol you want to use. There are, unfortunately, degrees of variation between systems which merely begin with the naming of commands. Consequently, these tables should serve as a useful phrase-book.

In general, utilities also live in the same directory as their IPv4 counterparts, and hence would tend to be in your PATH (we only include the full path to a command if it is in some unusual location).

Turning on IPv6

Table 5-1 show a summary of how to enable IPv6 at boot on the various operating systems we are considering. Once IPv6 is enabled, the boot-time behavior of most platforms is to perform autoconfiguration, unless they are explicitly configured otherwise. As it may not be easy to restart the network subsystem to initialize IPv6, Table 5-2 shows how to configure IPv6 and enable autoconfiguration while the system is actually running. This may be useful during your initial experimentation. In fact, on some systems, squeezing variations on these commands into a user-editable ...