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Re: [LUG] Your ISP - and IPv6

 

On Fri, Jul 5, 2013 at 12:51 PM, Neil Winchurst wrote:
> I do not understand this business about setting up a tunnel. I am just about
> to do some research on it.

I'm sure you've found a lot of stuff on it, but here is the basic idea.

Internet traffic is sent in packets, that contain 'some information'.
If you load a web page, your computer sends some packets containing
the request to the web server hosting that page, and the web server
sends some packets containing the page back.

Think of packets as envelopes: the contain some information about
where to send it to on the 'outside' and then they have content
inside.

IPv4 and IPv6 are basically two different kinds of envelopes. They can
contain the same content, but if your router (or the router at your
ISP) only knows about one kind of envelope (IPv4) and sees another
kind of envelope (IPv6) it has no idea what to do with them. That's
why you can't use IPv6, unless your computer, your router and your ISP
all support it. The former will always do so, the latter two probably
not.

Tunnelling merely puts an IPv6 packet (that is, an envelope and its
content) inside an IPv4 one. There is a server somewhere on the
Internet that you send these packets to. It opens the envelopes and
sends the IPv6 packets on to its real destination. All traffic (back)
to you is sent as an IPv6 packet to that same server, which puts it in
an IPv4 envelope and sends it to you.

So tunnelling software does two things: it knows the address of such a
server, and it knows how to stuff all your IPv6 packets into IPv4
envelopes addressed to that server. There are different protocols for
tunnelling and what works best for you depend on your requirements and
your limitations.

Miredo (the Linux equivalent of Teredo, a protocol designed by a
Redmond-based software company) is supposed to be the 'last resort',
something to use if all else fails. If you are going to use IPv6 a
lot, you should probably look for something else, but as it's so easy
to set up (so easy that it barely deserves the term 'set up'), it's
ideal for testing.

Martijn.

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