Adventures in the future: IPv6

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At work today someone asked me what our IP address was (so they could whitelist our access to some server or other). I opened Google and typed “whats my ip” only to find an IPv6 address staring back at me. Lo and behold I was browsing Google over IPv6 all this time (I’m not sure since when) and I didn’t even know it.

It got me thinking that I should test IPv6 on my personal (mail and web) servers and set up some AAAA records for them.

I logged on to the mail server (a VPS from LoveServers), did a wget google.com and found that it used IPv6 out of the box. I tried the same thing on the web server (a VPS from OVH) and sadly that used IPv4 for a wget and a ping6 google.com failed with connect: Network is unreachable.

I struggled for a while to find some instructions that worked to configure IPv6 on the OVH VPS (their control panel showed me they provided a IPv6 address, but their help pages seemed too out of date for Ubuntu 18.04 which uses netplan to manage network setup).

Eventually I found a blog post with some instructions that worked, and after implementing those I was able to ping6 back and forth between my two machines with no problems at all.

(To be continued…)