The project: Build an IPv6 package to run a IPv6-only workstation

Project planning

• Goal
• Criteria
• Operating system
• Strategy
• Applications used
• IPv6 addresses
• Network architecture
  • DNS over IPv6
  • Mail over IPv6
  • HTTP over IPv6

How to configure servers and workstations

1. Goal

The main goal of this milestone is to demontrate that IPv6 services and applications are enough advanced to deploy IPv6-only workstations. Three fundamental Internet services have been identified as mandatory to realize this project : DNS for name resolution , Web to browse the WWW and mail to exchange messages.

DNS is a basic service that ensures a translation between names and IPv6/IPv4 addresses. IPv6 is using larger addresses (128 bits) than IPv4 (32 bits), DNS service will be most important on IPv6 than it is actually used with IPv4. Web service is the second service bringing the way to reach any Web on the Internet. And, the third one is mail that allows to any user to exchange messages over the net. These services will be usable under an IPv6-only workstation only.

We hope this work will be useful for the IPv6 community in Canada and around the world and will influence developpers to do more work to port their applications to IPv6. There is more work to do to have the same level of service on IPv6 than we have on the Internet IPv4.

2. Requirements for an IPv6-only workstation

These are basic requirements identified to have a working IPv6-only workstation:

The workstation (client side):

• Operating system must use IPv6 as protocol (the only one protocol used on the computer must be IPv6)
• Must be able to send DNS queries over IPv6 to a DNS server running over IPv6
• Must be able to reach any IPv6 and/or IPv4 Web sites from an IPv6 Web browser
• Must be able to send and receive e-mail over IPv6
• Web client and E-mail client must have a graphical inteface
• Every applications must be freely available from the Internet (with source code )

3. Operating system selected for the workstation

For this milestone, FreeBSD version 4.2 STABLE has been selected. Differents applications running over IPv6 will be configured to run a full IPv6 workstation.

4. Strategy proposed

Using Internet applications that run on workstation over IPv6 only is a recent approach in the IPv6 world except probably in Japan where developers are using IPv6 every days. The current approach on IPv6 is to use dual protocol stack (IPv6/IPv4) for any workstation that would have to use IPv6 applications. This is interesting for whom has the intent to try IPv6 lightly but if a well-known application doesnt support IPv6, this approach fallbacks to IPv4.

Many developpers are working to port applications from IPv4 to IPv6 or to develop new ways to use current IPv4 applications under IPv6 but no one has really taken the time to evaluate if it could be possible to run day-to-day applications under IPv6 with applications already ported to IPv6. This work to this by "YES" and explains in details "How it is possible" with a special combination of free software for any workstation running FreeBSD 4.2 STABLE powered by a basic IPv6 network setup.

Basic IPv6 network setup requirements:

• DNS server supports both IPv4/IPv6 queries
• Web server acting as Proxy Web server under IPv6
• SMTP and POP3 servers support IPv6

4.1 Applications used to make the basic network setup

4.2 IPv6 addresses used in this testbed

4.3 Network architecture proposed