IPv6 with FreeBSD

I’ve been getting many hits of late about U-verse and IPv6.  Not sure why that’s happening, but in any case, my comments on the subject would actually work with any ISP.  U-verse is just what I happened to have at the time.

Moving on, one of the datacenters I use, OLM.net, just turned on IPv6 not long ago.  The way that they chose to configure the network is by using router advertisements, so no default gateway setting is needed.  In FreeBSD, this is not turned on by default.  Here are some instructions for any network that uses router advertisement.

Add the following lines to /etc/rc.conf:

ipv6_enable=”YES”

ipv6_ifconfig_xx0=”<insert IPv6 address here”

(Note:  replace the “xx0″ with the interface name in ifconfig of the card on the network, such as rl0, re0, etc.)

Add the following line to /etc/sysctl.conf:

net.inet6.ip6.accept_rtadv=1

Lastly, I created a script in /usr/local/etc/rc.d/ipv6, where I put the following lines:

#!/bin/sh

/sbin/rtsol xx0

(again, where xx0 is the interface name in ifconfig of your network card)

I found that I had to reboot the server.  I had tried some things to figure things out, so maybe if you follow these instructions, you may not need a reboot to get things going.  At the very least, if you choose not to reboot, you will need to run the following scripts:

/etc/rc.d/network_ipv6 start

/usr/local/etc/rc.d/ipv6

I hope this helps someone that is struggling to figure out how to get the router advertisements on their network.  If your network supports DHCPv6, these instructions probably aren’t needed, but if you have to manually configure your IPv6 address, but use router advertisement for the gateway, this procedure should work.