Toggen is IPv6 Live

by James McDonald | Jul 10, 2019 | IT Tips | 0 comments

So I haven't done much with IPv6 to date but have just discovered that my new NBN connection has IPv6 enabled...

So I have configured my Amazon VPC with a IPv6 address range and added or associated a IPv6 address to this websites EC2 eth0 interface

Also needed was adding a AAAA record in DNS

E.g. toggen.com.au AAAA 2406:da1c:f72:aa73:f84e:74fa:4f91:e542

And as I'm using nginx I had to make the nginx server listen on IPv6 by adding listen [::]:<port> directives:

server {
    listen 80;
    listen [::]:80;
    server_name toggen.com.au;
    return https://toggen.com.au$request_uri;
}
 
server {
    listen 443 ssl http2;
    listen [::]:443 ssl http2;
    server_name toggen.com.au;
    .... rest of ssl config 
}

Find the IPv6 hosts on your subnet

1	`ping6 -I en0 ff02::1`

The above will reply with the link-local addresses which always start with fe80::. The reply is limited to hosts on the current layer 2 network segment.

MacOS IPv6 Equivalent to arp -a — Showing MAC Address Table in MacOS

# firstly install the Linux utility using brew
brew install iproute2mac
 
# show 
ip -6 neigh show

Use nmap to find the services running on an IPv6 host via the link-local address

1	`nmap -6 -sV fe80::3a8b:59ff:fe82:fb44%en0`

The above takes a few minutes but you get a list of anything that open and listening on the target host and nmap educated guess as to what service it is

Use netcat6 to Connect to a Web Server on an IPv6 link-local Address

You can't use a link-local URL such as http://[fe80::3664:a9ff:fe5b:d4e7%en0] in Chrome or Safari. It is full of fail.

But you can use netcat6 to build a tunnel from a local port [8073] to the device and then use a browser to connect to http://[::1]:8073.

To achieve this I'm using netcat6 installed via homebrew on my Macbook

# netcat6 usage see below for explanation
nc6 --continuous --exec \
"nc6 fe80::3664:a9ff:fe5b:d4e5%en0 80" \
-l -p 8073 -vv
# wrapped for readability
# remove the backslashes and put this on one 
# line

The above nc6 command took me a while to figure out. In english the command is listen (-l) continuously (--continuous) on local port 8073 when something connects to port 8073 execute (--exec) a connection to the remote host ( fe80::3664:a9ff:fe5b:d4e5%en0 ) on the port ( 80 ) specified and pass any data back and forth between port 8073 and port 80 on the remote host. Be verbose about it (-vv).

Important note: fe80::3664:a9ff:fe5b:d4e5%en0 you need to append the %en0 or whatever your interface name is to the end of the link-local address as this tells it which interface to send it out. You can find your interface by running ifconfig, ip addr or ipconfig /all (for windows).