I’d been bemoaning the lack of IPv6 enablement in Debian, because I want to learn more about IPv6, and today I finally noticed the Debian IPv6 project. Somewhat annoyingly, ping doesn’t do the right thing with IPv6 addresses, there’s a separate ping6, and for reasons I don’t grok yet about the Debian package system, I don’t even have that; I’ve got fping6, which is slightly different.

Either way, I now have IPv6 goodness to play with. Apache, ssh, sshd, and mozilla all seem happily v6 enabled, and those are my major TCP/IP applications. Conveniently, tcpdump is also, although the debian version of netcat is not.

For those of you who were wondering, literal IPv6 addresses in URLs are to be enclosed in square-brackets like: http://[::1]/blog/, according to RFC 2732.