Surfing the IPv6 Internet
Web surfing using the popular browsers — Safari, Firefox. Camino, Opera — is pretty automatic. It starts with DNS. MacOSX perfers IPv6 addresses when it looks up a domain, so if a URL has both an IPv4 and IPv6 address (i.e., both A and AAAA zone records), then it will return the IPv6 address to the browser.
For example, my site WhatIsMyIPv6.com has both records:
$ nslookup > whatismyipv6.com. Address: 216.64.158.90 > set type=AAAA > whatismyipv6.com. whatismyipv6.com has AAAA address 2001:470:a02c::90
The above is a useful example of debugging IPv6 DNS, but some people prefer dig, which works similarly:
$ dig whatismyipv6.com A +short 216.64.158.90 $ dig whatismyipv6.com AAAA +short 2001:470:a02c::90
The +short tag on the end causes dig to abbreviate its output to a minimalist answer. Leave it off to get more detailed debugging info.
If DNS is working, then Safari, Firefox, and Opera will surf to IPv6 sites when available. Camino requires a tweak. Type about:config in the URL bar and press enter. Then type “ipv6″ in the Filter search bar and press enter. You’ll see a line that says network.dns.disableIPv6. Its default value is “true”. Double-click on this entry to toggle it to “false”. Then quit and restart Camino. Now it’s IPv6 enabled too.
Categories: Tips