IPv6 Tutorial
At the HEAnet conference in November we ran a tutorial on IPv6. The aim was to give people some experience configuring IPv6 on a typical desktop (in this case Windows XP) and to show off some of IPv6’s features.
The outline of the tutorial was:
- Turn on IPv6 on Windows XP.
- Use multicast pings and the neighbour cache to find the router.
- Log into the router and configure it.
- Check that router advertisements work.
- Do some IPv6 web browsing.
In practice, the routers were in a test tab in Dublin and the laptops were in a conference center in Athlone, so we had to figure out how to get LAN connectivity between the two. What we ended up doing was putting each laptop/router pair in a different VLAN and then shipping the trunked ethernet over MPLS to join two switches together. This worked pretty well, apart from the MTU issues - the combination of MPLS and VLAN tagging chewed a significant chunk of our MTU.
Now, Windows XP expects expects ethertnet to have an MTU of 1500 bytes, so this risked messing up our tutorial. PMTU discovery doesn’t help either, because the MTU drop is at layer 2, not between two layer 3 devices.
However, IPv6 came to the rescue! When configuring router advertisements we asked people to tell the router to advertise an MTU of 1280 bytes (which could be successfully be transmitted by the MPLS VLAN trunking). Windows XP picked this up correctly and it allowed the web browsing part of the tutorial to work successfully.
The pre-tutorial talk and the tutorial handouts are available if you’d like to see the details of the tutorial.