The US has run out of the older, 32-bit IPv4 addresses. While not all US-assigned addresses are being used, you can't buy any more, they have all been sold!
There is a newer, 128-bit system, IPv6, and there are plenty of addresses available for everyone. In fact there are theoretically enough IPv6 addresses so that EVERY ATOM in EVERY HUMAN BEING on earth could have a unique IPv6 address! This is a silly notion, but it illustrates that every device on earth can have a unique IPv6 address and this is a powerful idea. With world-routable IPv6 addresses for every hot-spot and repeater, routing methodologies can now exist in an address space that could facilitate the development of new capabilities.
With much help from Colby W1BSB, I'm happy to announce that QnetGateway now supports IPv4/IPv6 dual-stack internet capability. You may have already seen that our website has new tabs for IPv6 routing as we have quietly upgraded our Smart Group Servers to dual stack operation. With world routable device addresses, IPv6 holds great promise for D-Star routing. We will talk more about this in later posts.
For now you need to know how to turn it on. First, your internet provider has to support IPv6. If you are in the USA, a lot of providers already do. If your internet provider supports it, you may need to enable it in your home-router. Once you have it properly enabled, your connected devices should show new IPv6 addresses. On Raspian, you'll clearly see several "inet6" lines on the output of "ifconfig -a". If you see these inet6 addresses your ready to operate in dual-stack mode!
By default, QnetGateway is IPv4 only. You can configure your system to operate in "dual-stack mode" by joining both the IPv4 QuadNet server at rr.openquad.net and the new IPv6 QuadNet server at rrv6.openquad.net. Here is what my ircddb configuration looks like in qnconfig:
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?????????????? IRCDDB Menu
Routes to other clients using IRC Server A will be searched first
l? : Login - must be a legal callsign = 'N7TAE'
ha : Hostname for IRC Server A??????? = rrv6.openquad.net
hb : Hostname for IRC Server B??????? = rr.openquad.net
u? <key> to unset the value of key (revert to the default value).
q? to return to the main menu
Please input: <key> <new_value> # omit value to toggle a true/false :
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Please note that the Server A must be the IPv6 server in a dual-stack configuration. Also please note that routing on IPv6 in on the iana.org-approved UDP port 9011 and not port 40000 (IPv4 still uses 40000).
There are some important changes in this latest release, but since they don't affect any currently existing use case, we will discuss these in subsequent posts.
Tom Early