After reading www.postgresq.org now active over IPV6 by default I quickly tried some other host to see what the current state of IPv6 is for some known database websites.

$ getent hosts mysql.com percona.com askmonty.org postgresql.org oracle.com sqlite.org code.openark.org skysql.com drizzle.org
156.151.63.6    mysql.com
74.121.199.234  percona.com
173.203.202.13  askmonty.org
2a02:16a8:dc51::50 postgresql.org
137.254.16.101  oracle.com
67.18.92.124    sqlite.org
69.89.31.240    code.openark.org
94.143.114.49   skysql.com173.203.110.72  drizzle.org



So only postgresql.org supports IPv6 right now. On the MySQL side Facebook is one













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Use DNS directly from your database

mysql> SELECT lookup('localhost');
+---------------------+
| lookup('localhost') |
+---------------------+
| 127.0.0.1           |
+---------------------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

mysql> SELECT reverse_lookup('127.0.0.1');
+-----------------------------+
| reverse_lookup('127.0.0.1') |
+-----------------------------+
| localhost                   |
+-----------------------------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

This is how you install these functions.

Build udf_example.so which is in your mysql source. (make udf_example.so)

Copy the udf_example.so file from your build directory to your plugin_dir.

Create the lookup and reverse_lookup

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For MySQL it's a best practice to store IP addresses in a INT column rather than in a VARCHAR. This allows for more compact storage. This best practice is only for MySQL as PostgreSQL does have data types like inet and cidr.

MySQL is equiped with the INET_ATON() and INET_NTOA() functions since version 3.23.15. In MySQL 5.6.3 the INET6_ATON() and INET6_NTOA() functions were addes to finaly add IPv6 address support. To make it easier to work with IPv4 and IPv6 addresses the IS_IPV4_COMPAT(), IS_IPV4_MAPPED(), IS_IPV4() and IS_IPV6() functions were added. The difference between the new and old functions is that the old functions use INT UNSIGNED to store IP addresses and the new function uses VARBINARY(16) for IPv6 addresses and VARBINARY(4) for IPv4 addresses.

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For those that don’t follow the ARIN Public Policy Mailing List, the following is excerpted from a post by Thomas Narten in response to the announcement that the IESG has approved a new document to replace the existing RFC 3177 (IPv6 Address Assignment to End Sites).

> The IESG has approved the following document:
> – ‘IPv6 Address Assignment to End Sites’
> (draft-ietf-v6ops-3177bis-end-sites-01.txt) as a BCP

Quoting from the Introduction:

This document obsoletes RFC 3177, updating its recommendations in the following ways:

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A special extended edition of Tech Messages for 2011-01-07 through 2011-01-08:

• The Services Used By Y Combinator Startups [Infographic] – ReadWriteCloud
  "The results show that the majority of Y Combinator startups depend on cloud services instead of self-hosted servers, traditional web hosting or co-location services."
• Tom Limoncelli on Time Management | O'Reilly Time Management for System Administrators | Sysadmins
  Video companions to to Time Management for System Administrators by Thomas A. Limoncelli.

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Good news. I was told by a colleague that the Dutch ISP XS4ALL is offering IPv6 connectivity to its retail customers. You can see here although the comments are in Dutch.  They also provide a list of ADSL routers which should work for their service. The Cisco name may not be surprising but this is [...]

As I mentioned in a past article I got my IPv6 connectivity working so started working on setting up various IPv6 services. One of these was to setup my name server so it also worked on IPv6. This worked fine, but recently I lost my IPv6 connectivity but thought no more about it. I’m trying [...]

Originally submitted at O’Reilly

This essential guide explains what works, what doesn’t, and most of all, what’s practical about IPv6–the next-generation Internet standard. A must-have for network administrators everywhere looking to fix their network’s scalability and management problems. Also covers other IPv6 ben…

IPv6 Network Administration

A little outdated – needs updating

By Simon Mudd from Madrid, Spain on 8/18/2010 3out of 5

Pros: Well-written, Easy to understand

Cons: Too basic

I forgot  [Read more...]

I have just returned from holiday and while it’s not normal reading during some of my spare time I managed to read a couple of books on IPv6 I’d recently bought to get me up to scratch and refresh my memory on the topic.

These books are:

• Deploying IPv6 Networks, by Cisco
• Understanding IPv6, Second Edition by Microsoft

The first book is quite good, and while a little old provided a good solid background for me on the subject. A lot of the information was not relevant to my interest in setting up a networked SOHO network but that’s not really a problem. The background was interesting.

The second book was a bit of a mistake.

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As part of my IPv6 setup I wanted to check what support I could expect for my current hardware. This post relates the results I got by checking on each one.

• Linux PC – IPv6 is supported in Linux
• MacBook – IPv6 is supported in MacOS X
• Windows 7 NetBook – IPv6 is supported in Windows 7
• Draytek Vigor 2820N – Draytek support in Spain confirmed to plans to implement IPv6 on this box, but they have 1 IPv6 aware router so future models should hopefully have support.
• HP Officejet Ro L7680 Printer – this printer has a network connection. A support request on HP’s website generated an automatic message

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In order to use IPv6 you probably need to setup things so that your sites can be reached over IPv6. I manage my own DNS server for my domain so decided to make my DNS server reachable over IPv6.  This did not sound too complicated.

This required 2 things:

• Ensure that Bind 9 was configured to receive and respond to queries on this address
• Tell my registrar about the IPv6 address of my domain

I checked my DNS software, Bind (v9), and it did not seem to be responding to DNS requests to the IPv6 address. A quick look around indicated that I had to add an extra block in the options section of named.conf

options {
 directory "/etc/named";

 // required to listen for ipv6 queries
 listen-on-v6 { any; };

....

My registrar is

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When originally looking around to find out how to connect to a IPv6 network there seem to be quite a few different options and providers.

I originally requested an allocation with Hurricane Electric but had trouble setting up the tunnel. Their web page said they could not ping my public IP address (my router) and this prevented them allowing the tunnel to be created. My ADSL router does not have any ICMP filters configured and as the public IP address is forwarded to my Linux PC I knew that did not either. I also remember when setting up my ADSL connection with Jazztel that I had some configuration issues, and this turned out to be related to the fact (from what I remember) that Jazztel block ICMP traffic to the customer’s IP address.  So with this problem I looked to see if I could find another tunnel broker.

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The following page http://blog.wl0.org/ipv6-setup-progress/ is going to be used to show how I make progress in setting up IPv6 and the issues I come across.

Other the last few years I’ve read quite a lot about IPv6 but not really done a lot about it. The theory is easy but when you actually look to try to set it up you suddenly find that most hardware does not really support it.

• My ISP (Jazztel) have told me they don’t provide an IPv6 service.
• My Draytek 2820n ADSL router does not support IPv6. Draytek seem to be just starting to look at this in their Vigor 2130 series, but my ADSL router is not covered.
• My Thecus N5200 Pro NAS device does run Linux underneath so it can be configured to support IPv6. I’ve

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This is going to be a really short post, but for someone it could save an hour of life.

So, you’ve nothing to do and you’ve decided to play around with IPv6 or maybe you’re happened to be an administrator of a web service that needs to support IPv6 connectivity and you need to make your nginx server work nicely with this protocol.

First thing you need to do is to enable IPv6 in nginx by recompiling it with --with-ipv6 configure option and reinstalling it. If you use some pre-built package, check if your nginx already has this key enabled by running nginx -V.

The results should have --with-ipv6 option in configure arguments:

1
2
3
4
5
[root@node ~]# nginx -V
nginx version: nginx/0.7.64





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As a long-time registrar, we are aware of the importance of keeping up with the internet, as well as trying to be at the forefront of changing technologies as we have done for the past four years. Now it's time to do the same with IPv6!

As a result of this and requests from our customers coupled with the ominous depletion of IPv4 address space, I am pleased to announce that we will be offering IPv6 connectivity for our customers.  Given that IPv6 is the future of the Internet, it is perfectly logical that it is something of particular interest to us.  

This is, of course, not an overnight affair, and will take some time to be able to fully offer the service for all customers, and at the moment we expect to pass through several stages of testing before general deployment.   In any case, we hope to have IPv6 fully available for our customers before the end of the

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