Request: ip6 and a simple way to turn it on

Networking
1

request: ip6 and a simple way to turn it on.

and kernel 6.9 and up

i have a high speed network card i wanna use

2

sorry to say IPv6 is not supported

3

OK. If your not gonna be able to make a ip6 firewall. What about a option for a ip6 pass through. Like on a Asus consumer product.

An option is all I ask. Reason is. It’s internet 2.
I have a winserver 2022, and I have Lan setup. Ip4 and ipv6. Ipfire is the last step.

4

not that I have heard of.

Can anyone else answer for sure?

5

ipV4 DNS will resolve AAAA queries. So what is the real use case inside the network?

6

Higher throughput. While it’s easy to max out a 1Gbps network share with ipv4 with just one user, ipv6 makes it possible to max out a 10Gbps link with an identical setup. Using ipv4 my NAS has problems pushing past 7Gbps.

My ISP doesn’t even support ipv6 so I can’t use it outside my LAN, but internally I have to configure the storage network manually.

7

It would have to do with packet size and routing performance rather than any of the enhanced features of IPv6.

Is the NAS a separate machine or is it Samba on a IPfire install?

8

Just a guess, but is it possible that you’d get the throughput you want if you increased the MTU of your PCs NICs, while still using IPv4?

Note that there’s a small latency cost to configuring larger packets.

9

I think you won’t get it because you don’t want to test it yourselves, but in good faith I’ll post this. The NAS network and internet run on separate wires with separate NICs.

The internet/LAN runs on a wired, dedicated 1Gbps set of wires/NICS and the NAS/SAN runs on it’s own 10Gbps wires with an MTU of 16000.

I have tried both ipv4 and ipv6 for the storage network and ipv6 wins hand down.

The Storage system:

Ryzen 9 3950 (16 cores, 32 theads) with 128 GB RAM. It has 4x 4TB Toshiba N300 HDDs and each HDD has a Samsung 256GB SSD caching it with bcache. The drives are configured as a RAID0 and the filesystem is XFS. The OS is Debian Bookworm.

The storage NICs are Intel X540 chipset on the server and the same for one client and AQtion AQC107 on two others.

Should it work better than it does on ipv4? Yes! Does it? No!

10

I have a windows server 2022 handing out ip4 and 6 addresses. Dns. Printer and file server. I have a 2010 Intel quad 4 doing ipfire. Dedicated. No dns. No dhcp. Just firewall, VPN, ssh. Url filter.

It’s a nice setup.

I have AdGuard on the windows server.

I hope this setup inspires people.

Merry Christmas.

11

I tested it on my system. it doesn’t perform any better, but I imagine if my network was mostly switches there might be an advantage, however, I know how to configure STP so the advantages people see in a non optimised networks is not present.

I tested other router software and like this one the network stack has to be modified when you want to use connections faster than 1Gb. All of them have somewhat patched driver profiles, and ipfire modified its stack memory for simple router use. But I know that when I update my home, I will have to play with network stack when I update it to 10Gb. Because operating systems are not optimised for this usage and these settings are not universal. So the optimal network stack settings for a network device are going to be different when using different hardware. But operating systems just have one default setting…

But further analysis of the network stack of the Debain NAS might be in order since there is a secondary effect that causes an increase in memory pool size of network buffers by engaging IPv6.