Enabling IPv6 on OS X

or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Dancing Kame

Note: This will apparently not work if you’re behind a NAT. I had to plug my machine directly into my cable modem to get it to work.

Open up a terminal. Type /sbin/ifconfig -a to list your devices. You should see something like:

en0: flags=8863 mtu 1500
        inet6 fe80::203:93ff:fe67:80b2%en0 prefixlen 64 scopeid 0x4 
        ether 00:03:93:67:80:b2 
        inet 192.168.1.101 netmask 0xffffff00 broadcast 192.168.1.255
        media: autoselect (none) status: active

Find the one that says “status: active”, usually this is en0. If it’s not, be sure to replace en0 with whatever it is in later instructions

Type:

sudo ip6config start-v6 en0; sudo ip6config start-stf en0

(stf is 6to4, a way of encoding IPv6 packets so they can go over the current IPv4 Internet.) Visit http://[3ffe:501:4819:2000:210:f3ff:fe03:4d0]/ in your web browser. If you see a dancing turtle, congratulations you’ve joined the currently completely useless IPv6 Internet.

Argh! Why don’t they turn this on by default? Who’s running this botched IPv6 transition?

But hey, I can see the dancing turtle. It’s not all bad.

posted February 05, 2003 01:32 PM (Technology) #