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A Guide for Understanding IPv6 on Linode

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An Overview of IPv6 on Linode

Default IPv6 Configuration

All Linodes are created with one IPv6 address, which is acquired by Stateless Address Autoconfiguration (SLAAC). IPv6 is fully enabled on all of Linode’s supported operating systems and uses hardware-based addressing.

Linode does not offer private IPv6 address allocations. Our IPv6 accounting was designed so that local IPv6 traffic does not count against your network transfer quota, so you can use your default IPv6 address as if it were a private IP address.

Note

In order for your Linode to receive its SLAAC address, it must respond to IPv6’s ping protocol.

Please be sure to allow ICMPv6 in your firewall. For example, in iptables, you can issue the following commands:

ip6tables -A INPUT -p icmpv6 -j ACCEPT
ip6tables -A FORWARD -p icmpv6 -j ACCEPT

How to Find Your IPv6 Address

You can find your Linode’s IPv6 address using the Linode Cloud Manager or the ip tool with the Linux Terminal.

Linode Cloud Manager

  1. Log in to your Linode Cloud Manager account and select the Linodes link in the sidebar to view a list of all your Linodes.

  2. On the Linodes page, under the IP Addresses column, you can quickly view each Linode’s IP addresses.

    List of Linodes to view your IPv6 address.

  3. To see a more detailed view, select the Linode whose IPv6 address you would like to find and click on its Networking tab.

  4. Under the IPv6 section, you can view the Linode’s SLAAC and Link Local IPv6 addresses.

    A Linode Networking Tab detail view.

Linux Terminal

  1. Using your terminal, SSH into the Linode whose IPv6 address you would like to find.

    ssh user@192.0.2.0

  2. Use the ip tool to find your Linode’s IPv6 address:

    root@localhost:~# ip -6 address
1: lo: <LOOPBACK,UP,LOWER_UP> mtu 65536 state UNKNOWN qlen 1
    inet6 ::1/128 scope host
      valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever
3: eth0: <BROADCAST,MULTICAST,UP,LOWER_UP> mtu 1500 state UP qlen 1000
    inet6 2600:3c02::f03c:91ff:fe24:3a2f/64 scope global mngtmpaddr dynamic
      valid_lft 2591998sec preferred_lft 604798sec
    inet6 fe80::f03c:91ff:fe24:3a2f/64 scope link
      valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever

  • Line 3 shows the IPv6 loopback interface, ::1/128. This is used for IPv6 traffic within the system, similar to the 127.0.0.0/8 IPv4 address block.

  • Line 6 is the Linode’s public IP address, 2600:3c02::f03c:91ff:fe24:3a2f/64. You can see it’s in a /64 range.

  • Line 8 is the link-local IPv6 address, fe80::f03c:91ff:fe24:3a2f/64. An IPv6 link-local address is a unicast address that is automatically configured on any interface.

If your Linode does not have the correct IPv6 address or any IPv6 address at all, you should verify that you have router advertisements enabled and IPv6 privacy extensions disabled. Your Linode will need to accept router advertisements for SLAAC to function. These settings are properly configured by default in our supported distributions.

Additional IPv6 Addresses

You can request additional IPv6 addresses at any time by opening a support ticket. While default IPv6 addresses are configured automatically, you will need to statically configure each IPv6 address in the range you request. See our static IP guide for instructions on how to do this.

IPv6 Prefixes and Pools

Note
The IPv6 /116 prefix is not available in the Toronto or Mumbai data centers.

IPv6 addresses are allocated in blocks. These are indicated with a slash / followed by a number in base 10, the length of the network prefix in bits. This translates to the number of available addresses in the pool. For example, the prefix /48 contains 2128-48 = 280 = 1,208,925,819,614,629,174,706,176 addresses. For an address like 2001:db8:1234::/48 the block of addresses is 2001:db8:1234:0000:0000:0000:0000:0000 to 2001:db8:1234:ffff:ffff:ffff:ffff:ffff.

The IPv6 prefixes and their respective quantity of IPv6 addresses that Linode provides are listed below.

Prefix Number of Addresses in Pool
/56 4,722,366,482,869,645,213,696
/64 18,446,744,073,709,551,616
/116 4,096

IPv6 Forwarding

For security reasons, IPv6 forwarding is not available on the Linode network. This is enforced by our network infrastructure.

More Information

You may wish to consult the following resources for additional information on this topic. While these are provided in the hope that they will be useful, please note that we cannot vouch for the accuracy or timeliness of externally hosted materials.

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This guide is published under a CC BY-ND 4.0 license.