Linux IPv6 over PPP
I’m often on the road, and sometimes I’d like to be able to connect back to the office network. Normally this is a perfect place for a VPN set up. When dealing with IPv4, a PPtP, OpenVPN, or IPSec based VPN will work fine. Given that I’m often behind firewalls, PPtP is my preferred choice, although OpenVPN would work well.
But I don’t like easy…If I had an ordinary network, that would be the beginning and pretty much the end of it. Setting up a PPtP based VPN with Linux is very well understood, and relatively easy.
Unfortunately, as I said; I don’t like easy. My core server network runs IPv6 natively (yes, there are IPv4 addresses, but all DNS hostnames resolve to the IPv6 address). I did this as part of an experiment to see how ready Linux is for IPv6 (as it turns out, very very ready, IPv6 allowed me to solve a number of issues that would have been problematic with v4).
I have looked around for documentation on setting up IPv6 over PPP, and unfortunately, aside from some RFCs on the matter, there is very little documentation. The PPP man page does at least mention IPv6, but I must confess that I can’t follow it.
So over the next week, I’m going to make a concerted effort to set up a IPv6 PPtP tunnel for my laptop to connect to the core network. After I’ve figured it out, I’ll document it here.
If anyone happens to know already of a Howto on IPv6 over PPP, I would appreciate not having to write one myself.
