Shortly before the holidays, the EVE-Team made us all another huge Christmas Present. And I’m not talking about the 30% off for the PRO Edition which you totally should check out on www.eve-ng.net. I’m talking about the ability to run EVE-NG in IPv6-only Environments. YES – it happened 😀

The latest EVE-NG-Pro ( 2.0.6 – 31 ) already introduced the ability to run v6 on the MGMT-Interface of your EVE (manually, but now possible), however, the Pro-Licensing-Server was only reachable via IPv4.
That changed yesterday 🙂

You can now talk to the Lic-Server via IPv4 and IPv6, enabling your EVE-NG-Pro to always fetch a valid license regardless of your IP underlay. This enables a lot of folks the ability to run EVE-NG where only IPv6 is provided (Asia or Germany if you signed up with Unitymedia for example).

Here’s how I “tweaked” my EVE to run in v6-only (Hetzner Server, therefore the Default-Gateway of fe80::1):

# The primary network interface
iface eth0 inet manual
auto pnet0

iface pnet0 inet6 static
  # Main IPv6 Address of the Server
  address 2a01:xxxx:xxxx:xxxx::xxxx
  netmask 64
  gateway fe80::1
  dns-nameservers 2001:4860:4860::8844 2001:4860:4860::8888

As you can see this Server now runs on v6 only via pnet0 (eth0, WAN).
You can access the Web interface via v6, the Server itself can reach out to the License-Server and all Labs run as usual (internally you can of course still use v4).

In the next step, I will tweak the Server so that your internal v4-Addresses-only Hosts will be translated via NAT64 to reach the internet 🙂 That will be posted probably at the end of this week 🙂

I will not try NAT66, because I think that NAT66 is the most stupid Idea ever and breaks the concept of IPv6 in a fundamental way…

I will also try SLAAC with the EVE-NAT-Cloud – with v6 you have so many possibilities and will never run out of addresses again.

I’m a big supporter of IPv6 as you know and running EVE in v6 only is a huge Improvement. Some of you might think “meh – calm down – it’s only another IP Notation”. I can assure you, that it’s far more than that. And if you look at ALL Vendors out there, they all still have a huge way to go until we can live in an IPv6 only world and finally dump v4, NAT and all other evil stuff created out of Address shortage 😛

Happy Holidays