Introduction
In
this guide, you will configure IPv6 support on your TeraSwitch VPS.
This will allow it to communicate across the internet using the latest
standards.
Prerequisites
Before you begin this guide you’ll need the following:
- One Linux VPS running CentOS 7
Step 1 — Locating the Address
To
start, you need to locate the IPv6 address that was automatically
assigned to your server. Login to your TeraSwitch portal at
https://my.teraswitch.com/clientarea.php.
From the top menu bar, navigate to
Services >
My Services, and then choose the VPS you would like to configure.
Next, scroll down to
Interfaces and look for
Fixed IP Address. You will see at least two addresses. The longer one is your
IPv6 address for this specific server.
For example, the IPv6 address for your server might look similar to this:
2607:fdc0:2:0:f816:3eff:fea6:2734
Step 2 — Calculating the Gateway
CentOS will also need to know the location of the
default gateway in order to sucessfully send traffic outside the network. At TeraSwitch, this will always be the address ending in
...0000:0000:0000:0001.
In IPv6, we can compress all of those zeroes, and rewrite the ending like this:
::1
So for example:
|
|
| If your IPv6 address is: |
2607:fdc0:2:0:f816:3eff:fea6:2734 |
| Your default gateway is: |
2607:fdc0:2:0::1 |
Step 3 — Applying the Configuration
In this step you will insert the address and gateway into CentOS’s configuration.
To do this, connect to your server, and then open the
/etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0 file with root privileges:
sudo nano /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0
At the bottom of this file, add the following lines, replacing
your_ipv6_address and
your_ip_gateway with the values you located in the previous steps.
IPV6INIT=yes
IPV6ADDR=your_ip_address
IPV6_DEFAULTGW=your_ip_gateway
Step 4 — Restarting the network service
Finally, in CentOS we can restart the network by running the following command:
sudo systemctl restart network
Your terminal session will briefly pause while your VPS’s network goes down and comes back online.
Verify that you can ping IPv6 addresses:
ping6 2606:4700:4700::1111
You’ll see the following output:
PING 2606:4700:4700::1111(2606:4700:4700::1111) 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 2606:4700:4700::1111: icmp_seq=1 ttl=60 time=0.535 ms
64 bytes from 2606:4700:4700::1111: icmp_seq=2 ttl=60 time=0.300 ms
64 bytes from 2606:4700:4700::1111: icmp_seq=3 ttl=60 time=0.314 ms
You can also list the default route for IPv6 traffic:
/sbin/ip -6 route show
You’ll see the following output:
2607:fdc0:2::/64 proto kernel metric 256 pref medium
fe80::/64 proto kernel metric 256 pref medium
default via 2607:fdc0:2::1 metric 1 pref medium
Conclusion
In this article you enabled IPv6 support for your VPS, future-proofing it for next generation applications.
Next, consider double checking that any firewall rules you may have are also configured for IPv6.
