Technology

What is World IPv6 day? - It is a trial period where a number of major web sites will provide their content on both IPv4 and IPv6. This is being sponsored by the Internet Society (ISOC) more information is posted on their World IPv6 Day page.

What is the point? - The goal is to motivate organizations across the industry – Internet service providers, hardware makers, operating system vendors and web companies – to prepare their services for IPv6 to ensure a successful transition as IPv4 addresses run out.

Recently i rented a new server to replace my main server, since i original posted the basic server setup blog i have found a much easier and quicker way to setup everything including webmin and virtualmin.

As my server is hosted in a Data centre they install the base operating system (CentOS 5.x) for me but if you have physical access you can do this yourself, you just need to grab the dvd(s) or cd(s) images mirror list here

Once you have the base operating system installed its time to setup everything.

In this blog I'll try and explain what ipv6 is and how i setup the server to use it.

What is IPv6? IPv6 is pretty much the same as IPv4. IPv4 is what is primarily used on the internet today. The big difference is the size of the address. The address for IPv6 are 128 bits long vs 32 bits for IPv4. IPv6 also uses hex to express address where as IPv4 only uses numeric values so you will see numbers 0-9 and letters A-F in a IPv6 address.

This is how i first setup my server so it has basic functions like Apache web server (SSL-capable), Postfix mail server with SMTP-AUTH and TLS, BIND DNS server, Proftpd FTP server, MySQL server, Dovecot POP3/IMAP, Quota, Firewall, etc. Most of this has setup is based off various different tutorials i've used.

As my server is hosted in a Data centre they install the base system (CentOS 5.x) for me but if you have physical access you can do this yourself, you just need to grab the 1x dvd or 6x cd images mirror list here

Well seeing as this blog is a way for me to document what i do to the servers i use i should start by giving some specs on the main server it self.

My main server is hosted by INX-Gaming at Bluesquare Datacentre, Maidenhead.
Its a self managed dedicated server with a 100mbit connection
Dell PowerEdge 860 1U rack mount
Intel Xeon Dual core CPU 3040
Ram 4GB (2x 2GB DDR2)
Hard drive sata 250GB
Its running Linux CentOS 5.4 with the PAE kernel.