6.2 Configuring 6to4 Tunnels

You can use the 6to4 tunneling technique to enable the host to encapsulate the IPv6 traffic in the IPv4 header and send over the IPv4 Internetwork (Internet). This is one of the mechanisms used to ease the transition of networks from IPv4 to IPv6.

The 6to4 feature is set to No by default. To enable it, set the 6to4 parameter to Yes in the ip6.cfg file under sys:\etc.

[Interface All]
6to4    Yes

This enables the machine as a 6to4 host. A 6to4 pseudo-interface is created with an IPv6 address of 2002:AABB:CCDD::AABB:CCDD, where AABB:CCDD is the colon-hexadecimal representation of the IPv4 address a.b.c.d assigned to the node. You can now send and receive 6to4 traffic over this machine. However, you need to ensure that the machine has a public IPv4 Internet address. Private addresses like 192.168.x.x or 10.x.x.x, 172.16/12, auto-conf addresses 169.254.x.x, and loopback addresses 127.x.x.x are ignored.

You can configure a 6to4 node as a 6to4 router. The 6to4 router encapsulates the IPv6 packets received from the private interface into IPv4 packets before forwarding them on the public interface. For example, if you have only IPv6 nodes in your network or nodes that have IPv4 private addresses, this prevents the host from using the 6to4 feature directly. Therefore, the host can acquire the 6to4 prefix from the 6to4 router (which has a public IPv4 address and is connected to the IPv4 Internet) and configure IPv6 addresses. The host can then forward its IPv6 traffic to the 6to4 router that takes care of the tunneling.

To configure a 6to4 router:

  1. Enable forwarding on the node.

    Refer to the Router variable in the Interface All record under Configuration File Format.

  2. Configure the rtadvd.cfg file to advertise the 6to4 prefix (2002:AABB:CCDD::/48) to the IPv6 nodes on the private interface.

    Refer to Rtadvd.cfg File.

  3. Configure the rtadvd.cfg file to advertise itself as the default router by setting the RADefaultLifeTime to a nonzero value.

    Refer to Configuration File Format.