The IPv6 Internet: Connect Today with Linux

The Internet protocol version 6 (IPv6) is the next generation Internet protocol designed by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) as a replacement for the Internet protocol version 4 (IPv4). Most of today's Internet uses IPv4, which has been remarkably resilient despite its age; however, it is beginning to have problems in various areas. Its most visible shortcoming is the growing shortage of IPv4 addresses needed by all the new devices connecting to the Internet. Other limitations exist in Quality-of-Service (QoS), security, auto-configuration, and mobility aspects. As a result, the IETF defined IPv6 to fix the problems in IPv4 and added many enhancements to cater to the future Internet.

Migration from IPv4 to IPv6 has been underway for a few years now, encouraged by the availability of IPv6 implementations on most operating systems and router platforms, and the availability of an IPv6 backbone that is being used for testing and deployment. In this article, I will provide a tutorial that will allow you to enable IPv6 support on your Linux machine and connect it to the IPv6 backbone (also called IPv6 Internet or the 6bone).

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