This is an old revision of the document!


IPv6 on AfterNET

What is IPv6?

IPv6 is the next version of the Internet Protocol used to address and communicate with systems connected to the internet, and it will eventually replace the current version of the Internet Protocol, IPv4. The most notable feature of IPv6 is a dramatic increase in the number of IP addresses available to be assigned to internet-connected devices.

Every computer connected directly to today's internet is assigned a unique IP address, like 192.0.32.10. There are roughly 4 billion of these addresses available, and we are quickly running out of them. In fact, countries like China already have more internet-connected people than IP addresses to give them. There are a variety of workarounds that allow a single “real” IP address to serve multiple people, but the people who receive this kind of internet access often have technical problems if they want to run their own servers, play online games, share files via protocols like bittorrent, or connect to their workplace network to work from home.

IPv6 solves the IPv4 address shortage by increasing the number of available IP addresses from 4,294,967,296 to 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456. While this is a lot of addresses, the large address space is also being used to enable several other improvements to the Internet Protocol, such as making it easier for devices to configure their own addresses and for internet routers to send data to you more quickly.

We're currently in a transition period where most computers have IPv4 addresses and some computers have both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses. As technical support for IPv6 increases, more and more computers will have both types of addresses, and once most computers are reachable via both IPv4 and IPv6, we can begin phasing out IPv4 addresses entirely.

How to I set up IPv6 on my computer?

Before you work too hard, check that you don't already have it! Try visiting http://ipv6.google.com/ and see whether it works.

The rest of this section is under construction, so check back soon!

Native IPv6 connectivity

Autoconfigured 6to4 tunnels

Manually established tunnels

How do I connect to AfterNET via IPv6?

Our IPv6 server address

You can reach IPv6-enabled AfterNET servers by connecting to irc.ipv6.afternet.org. Once the quality of our IPv6 network is judged to be on par with our IPv4 network and we're convinced that misconfigured clients won't mistakenly try using our AAAA records, we'll publish our AAAA records in the normal irc.afternet.org round-robin address. Until then, we want to make sure nobody ends up on our IPv6 network accidentally.

IRC client support

This section is under construction, so check back soon!