AboutPC-BSD is IPv6-ready

PC-BSD is IPv6-ready

PC-BSD^® and IPv6 Day

The FreeBSD and PC-BSD projects are participants in World IPv6 Day. To celebrate this global event, IPv6-only versions of FreeBSD and PC-BSD are available for testing. You can learn more about these versions at the IPv6-Only wiki page. You can provide feedback on your experience of testing the PC-BSD version on the PC-BSD Testing mailing list.

IPV6 Day: The Aftermath

World IPv6 Day was an extraordinary example of how the Internet industry can come together to promote a technology vital to its future success. The Internet Society collected some of the many articles, presentations, and videos delivered around the world.

PC-BSD and IPv6

FreeBSD has provided built-in, optional IPv6 support for over a decade thanks to the KAME project. Since PC-BSD is based on FreeBSD, PC-BSD users have always had the option to configure their systems to use IPv4 or IPv6. The IPv6-only PC-BSD snapshot will provide an exceptional tool for advanced users and developers of IPv6 applications to test PC-BSD's readiness for an IPv6-only environment.

The infrastructure used by the PC-BSD project is hosted at two separate datacenters with full IPv6 functionality. All services are provided by servers running FreeBSD 8.2 with full IPv6 connectivity at the server and services level. In addition to the website, the resources provided for the PC-BSD project include a subversion repository, a translation portal, forums, an FTP server, and a Trac instance for project management, all of which are fully IPv6 enabled.

What is IPv6?

When the internet was in its infancy and had fewer users, the total size of addressable internet address space was a non-issue.

In the present day, overall internet usage has exploded. No longer is the demand for internet addresses limited to just computers. Video game consoles, set top boxes, routers, smartphones - more and more devices are able to connect to the internet.

Because of this, the current format (called IPv4) is running out of space.

IPv6 address example:

2001:db8:4672:6565:2026:5043:2d42:5344

This is an IPv6 address. It's longer and far less limited. If you wanted to give an IPv6 address to every person on earth, and then start giving them to stars in the sky, you would run out of stars before you ran out of addresses.

However, for the new addressing scheme to be effective, every internet-capable device must be able to understand both IPv6 and IPv4 addresses.

IPv4 address example:

192.0.2.1

In the example above, each block may contain any number from 0 to 255, which allows for approximately 4.3 billion (232) addresses. Nearly all of them are allocated, and many are in use. Rather than begin buying and selling address space, and misusing the system to expand addressable space, a new system was developed to counter the effects of address space exhaustion.