IPv6 Network Administration

Applications

So, you've now got your workstation talking IPv6. What's next? Well, it would be nice to be able to run some applications that use IPv6. We'll look at IPv6 support in the sort of applications many of us use regularly. We'll leave the configuration of the corresponding server-side software until Chapter 7.

Naturally, we can only survey the support available at the time of writing. As we'll see in Chapter 8, adding IPv6 support can be relatively straightforward, so if your favorite application is listed as not supporting IPv6 then you should contact your vendor as they may have added it since we checked their software.

Web Browsers

A growing number of web browsers now support IPv6. In some cases the support varies from platform to platform; for example, some browsers have restrictions on how IPv6 web servers can be specified.

There are various sites you can visit to check if your browser supports IPv6. The standard test is to visit http://www.kame.net/, where the turtle at the top of this page will dance if you requested the page by IPv6. The KAME page also shows your IPv4 or IPv6 address at the bottom of the page.

Tip

Remember to hit reload or refresh on your browser if you have visited the page by IPv4 recently; otherwise, it may have the IPv4 version of the page cached.

Note that on all platforms it is possible to view IPv6 content on an IPv4-only browser by using a dual-stack proxy. We'll talk more about this in Section 7.3.4 of Chapter 7.

Unix

Several browsers under Unix ...