Tag Archives: IPv6

Why counting IPv6 Addresses is nonsense

From time to time I stumble upon Tweets about counting the number of IPv6 addresses (1 2 3). While I think it is ok to do it that way when you’re new to IPv6 and you want to get an idea of it, it does not make sense at all because the mere number of IPv6 addresses is ridiculously high and only theoretically, but has no relevance for the real-world at all. Let me state why:

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Zehn Vorteile von IPv6!

Das moderne Internetprotokoll IPv6 gilt als so komplex und umständlich, dass manche Administratoren beharrlich beim vertrauten, aber veralteten IPv4 bleiben. Zehn Praxisbeispiele belegen, warum viele Netzwerkanwendungen besser und kostengünstiger auf IPv6 laufen und wie Admins davon profitieren.

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Netzwerkprotokolle: Nachschlagewerk für Wireshark

Wenn es im Netzwerk knirscht, versuchen Admins den Fehler in Analyse-Tools wie Wireshark anhand von Paketmitschnitten einzukreisen. Jedoch hat der Herr viel mehr Netzwerkprotokolle gegeben, als sich ein Admin-­Hirn in allen Details merken kann. Eine Referenzdatei, die zahlreiche korrekte Protokoll­abläufe enthält, gibt Orientierung.

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Netzwerkmitschnitte mit tshark analysieren

Haben Sie mal Netzwerkmitschnitte untersucht, ohne zu wissen, was genau Sie suchen? Mit Wireshark wird das leicht zu einer Odyssee: Das Analysewerkzeug filtert zwar fabelhaft, reagiert bei großen Datenmengen aber schnell zäh.

Was bei solchen Problemstellungen hilft ist: tshark! Ein Tool, mit welchem Sie auch große Packet Captures einfach anhand gängiger Kriterien durchforsten können.

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#heiseshow: IPv6 setzt sich langsam durch – die wichtigsten Fragen

Ich durfte zu Gast bei der #heiseshow zum Thema IPv6 sein. In Anlehnung an die Artikelserie über IPv6 in der c’t 7/2022, in der auch mein Artikel über die Vorteile von IPv6-Adressen erschienen ist, ging es bei diesem Video-Podcast um gängige Fragen zu IPv6 sowohl im Heimanwender- als auch im Enterprise-Segment. Ne knappe Stunde lief die Schose und ich empfand es als ziemlich kurzweilig. ;)

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DHCPv6 Relay Issue with Cisco ASA and Ubuntu

Some months ago, my co-worker and I ran into an interesting issue: a notebook with a newly installed Ubuntu 20.04 does only work with IPv4, but this office network is dual-stacked (IPv4 and IPv6). Other Linux clients as well as Windows and Mac systems still work fine. They all get an IPv4 configuration by DHCPv4 and an IPv6 configuration by stateful DHCPv6 from the same DHCP server, relayed by a Cisco ASA 5500-X. What’s wrong with Ubuntu 20.04?

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Publishing IPv6 NTP Servers with DHCPv6

During the last weeks, I had an interesting request to publish NTP servers to client systems by using DHCPv6 in an IPv6 only network. Our Fortigate (or me?) had to learn how to publish the information. Hence this post is not only about NTP and IPv6, but a small guide on how to walk through RFCs and how to get out the relevant information. I’m very happy I got the possibility to share my experience here. Thank you, Johannes!

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syslog-ng with TLS: Installation Guide

Some years ago I wrote a blog post called “Basic syslog-ng Installation“. While I used it myself quite often in my labs or at the customers’ sites, it shows only basic UDP transport which is both unreliable and insecure. So, let’s have a look at a fresh installation of syslog-ng with TLS support for security reasons. However, TCP and UDP as transport are covered as well for the support of legacy systems.

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Capturing – because I can: IS-IS, GLBP, VRRP

I am constantly trying to add more protocols to the Ultimate PCAP. Hence I used some time in my (old) Cisco lab to configure and capture the following protocols: IS-IS, GLBP, and VRRP. And since Alexis La Goutte sent me some CAPWAP traffic, this protocol is also added. All packets are now found in another update of the Ultimate PCAP. Here are some details:

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Certificate Transparency & Alternative Name Disclosure

Maybe you’ve heard of Certificate Transparency and its log. Citing Wikipedia: “Certificate Transparency (CT) is an Internet security standard and open source framework for monitoring and auditing digital certificates.” Basically, it gives you information about any public certificate that is issued. Besides its advantages, I thought of one possible problem as it leaks all FQDNs to the public when using TLS certificates, for example from Let’s Encrypt.

A similar problem might arise when using a single X.509 certificate with a couple of DNS names (subject alternative name SAN) from which one should be kept “private”. It will be publicly known as well.

Hence I made a self-experiment in which I generated two certificates with random names, monitoring the authoritative DNS servers as well as the IPv6 addresses of those names in order to check who is resolving/connecting to otherwise unknown hostnames. Here we go:

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UK IPv6 Council Spring 2020: Incorrect Working IPv6 Clients & Networks

I did a short presentation at the spring 2020 roundtable of the UK IPv6 Council. The talk was about a case study I did with my NTP server listed in the NTP Pool project: For 66 days I captured all NTP requests for IPv6 and legacy IP while analyzing the returning ICMPv6/ICMPv4 error messages. (A much longer period than my initial capture for 24 hours.) Following are my presentation slides along with the results.

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SharkFest’19 EUROPE: IPv6 Crash Course

I gave a session about IPv6 at SharkFest’19 EUROPE, the annual Wireshark developer and user community conference, named “IPv6 Crash Course: Understanding IPv6 as seen on the wire“. The talk is about the IPv6 basics, which are: IPv6 addresses & address assignment, link-layer address resolution, and ICMPv6. Tips for using Wireshark coloring rules and display filters round things up.

As I have not yet published the slides, here they are. Unfortunately, we were not able to record the session due to technical problems. Neither the video nor the audio. ;( Hence, here are only mere slides.

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More Capture Details

In the previous post, I released my Ultimate PCAP which includes every single pcap I had so far on my blog. But that’s not all: I have some packets in there that were not yet published up to now. That is, here are some more details about those (probably well-known) protocols. These are:

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The Ultimate PCAP

For the last couple of years, I captured many different network and upper-layer protocols and published the pcaps along with some information and Wireshark screenshots on this blog. However, it always takes me some time to find the correct pcap when I am searching for a concrete protocol example. There are way too many pcaps out there.

This is supposed to change now:

I’m publishing a single pcap meant to be a single point of source for Wireshark samples. It summarises *all* previous ones from my blog and even adds some more protocols and details. I will constantly add more packets to this pcap if I have some. Currently, it has 80+ different protocols and hundreds of variants, such as IPv6 and legacy IP traffic, different DNS query types, ICMP error codes, and so on.

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