[ NOTE: this article began as the front page of the IPv6 Summit.ca website ]

Whenever you use the Internet, you are using an Internet Protocol (IP) - a set of rules for communication between computers. Internet Protocol Version 6 (or IPv6 for short) is an upgrade to the most widely available Internet Protocol (version 4, or IPv4). These Internet Protocols are used to assign each computer with an address (called an IP address) that uniquely identifies it on the Web and allows other computers to communicate with it.

In the summer of 2010 a half dozen OCLUG members decided it would be a good idea to put on an IPv6 conference for Ottawa. I was one of those people!

At the time IANA still had lots of IPv4 addresses, but it was projected to run out in May of 2011. It seemed that no one in Canada was doing anything about it, and people needed to be educated.

And so, the IPv6summit.ca was born.

Long time no blog… I’ve been realy busy getting the Ottawa IPv6 Summit off the ground (along with several other people from OCLUG). I’ll have to blog about that soon.

Anyway… I’ve also been learning a lot more about IPv6. Which reminded me that I never finished my IPv6 Certification from Hurricane Electric. I stopped at the Guri level because getting Sage (the top level) meant that I would have had to have a sane domain name registrar.

I just switched to the Holiday Miracle Plan from WindMobile.ca. I thought I’d mention it since it’s not advertised, but a fantastic deal. You have to sign up by December 26th, but you get to keep this rate for as long as you are a customer.

In short: it’s unlimited-everything for $40/month. It’s Wind, so there are no contracts, hidden fees, or strings attached.

Some people have been telling me that they “have no time” or “are too lazy” to setup IPv6 on their desktop, but would like to.

Below are 2 easy steps to get IPv6 running on your Debian Linux sytem (shoudl be identical on Ubuntu, and similar distros).

If you’re not running Linux, check out these pages instead: MacOS X, Windows.

I have an LVM volume, with xfs on it, that is almost full:

$ df /scratch -h
Filesystem                Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/vg-scratch    180G  175G  5.4G  98% /scratch

$ sudo lvdisplay /dev/mapper/vg-scratch
...
  LV Size                180.00 GB
...

But I have some more space in the physical volume. Let’s grow the logical volume.

If you have an IPv6 Linux network at home, you probably have a Linux host on the perimeter that’s running radvd – this is the server that responds to IPv6 neighbour discovery (ND) requests, distributes the default route to all your hosts, and tells your hosts how to auto configure themselves.

All these tasks were handled by the DHCP server, albeit a lot differently, in the good old days. The one other thing that dhcpd did for us was to tell all the hosts where the DNS servers were.

So, do I need to run the IPv6 version of dhcpd AND radvd?

Apparently there is a huge shortage of Canadian registrars that can provide full ipv6 support. The only one I was able to find is BareMeta.com, which despite it’s TLD operates out of Victoria, BC. I haven’t switched yet, because while they support ipv6 glue records for .ca, they don’t for .net yet.

Here is the discussion on dslreports.com where it was mentioned.

I’ve finally gotten onto the IPv6 bandwagon and went through the process of converting my network to IPv6. Ya know, the end is near.

I am using an he.net tunnel, and am almost done going through their certification process.

I was at Bridgehead earlier today and heard a cool tune. I asked the staff what it was, and they told me that it was Low Strung. After coming home I wanted to get the CD, but was unable to find it anywhere but iTunes. I don’t do iTunes, because Apple doesn’t do Linux… but fortunately my wife has a Mac.

So, after getting the album I had to convert it from .m4a to .mp3. I figured I’d share my script… convert-m4a-to-mp3. You’ll need to grab a few packages to use it: apt-get install zsh faad id3v2 twolame toolame.