In this article, you will learn about the syntax of IPv6 site-local addresses and link-local addresses, which are so-called local-use, unicast addresses.

In the last post of this IPv6 tutorial, you learned about the different address types and the new public IP addresses, the global unicast addresses. Today I will introduce the so-called local-use, unicast addresses, which are those IPv6 addresses that are not routed across the public Internet. There are two types of local-use, unicast addresses: site-local addresses and link-local addresses.

Site-local addresses

Site-local addresses are equivalent to private IP addresses in IPv4. The address space reserved for these addresses, which are only routed within an organization and not on the public Internet, is 10.0.0.0/8, 172.16.0.0/12, and 192.168.0.0/16. In IPv6, the first 10 bits of a site-local address are set to 1111111011, which is why these addresses always begin with FEC0. The following 54 bits are the subnet ID, which you can use in your organization for hierarchical routing, and the last 64 bits are the interface ID, which is the part that has to be unique on a link (local network on which hosts communicate without intervening routers). Thus, the prefix of a site-local address is FEC0::/10.

Note:  Site-local addresses have been deprecated, but existing implementations can still continue use them. Thus, they will probably stay around for a while. The proper way to work with private addresses in IPv6 is the use of unique local addresses which I will discuss in my next post.

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This part of the IPv6 tutorial discusses the three general IPv6 address types (unicast, multicast, anycast) and introduces the sub type global unicast address.

In my last post in the IPv6 series, you learned the IPv6 address syntax. Today, I will introduce the different types of IPv6 addresses.

IPv6 address types

There are three general types of IPv6 addresses: unicast, multicast, and anycast.

Unicast addresses

You know unicast addresses from IPv4. A unicast address is the most common form of an IP address and is assigned to one network interface.

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In this article, you will learn the main concepts of the IPv6 address syntax: colon-hexadecimal representation, leading zero suppression, zero compression, and IPv6 prefix.

Now that you know about the new features of IPv6, it is time to have a closer look at the practical details. In this post, I will give a short summary about the IPv6 address syntax. It is essentially a condensed version of the corresponding part in Microsoft’s white paper “Introduction to IP Version 6.”

Colon-hexadecimal representation

An IPv6 address consists of 128 bits and is presented in eight 16-bit blocks. Each 16-bit block is converted to a four-digit hexadecimal number. Blocks are separated by colons.

Example: 2001:0DB8:0000:2F3B:02AA:00FF:FE28:9C5A

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Designed to be used in large corporate networks, a free Wake-on-LAN utility from EMCO allows network administrators to wake up multiple remote PCs.

Submitted by Igor Vinnykov

If you’ve ever tried to use Wake-on-LAN technology, you may know that its configuration can be confusing sometimes. You have to enable WOL in BIOS and motherboard settings and correctly specify the WOL command parameters. Wake-on-LAN utilities (see a review for one of them) usually allow waking up one remote PC and require that you specify its IP and MAC addresses in order to generate and send a magic packet to it. In order to wake up multiple PCs, you have to write scripts to detect MAC addresses of remote PCs and execute a WOL utility to send the magic packet to every PC. A free Wake-on-LAN tool from EMCO is specially designed to wake up multiple remote PCs and allows automating all required operations.

Free Wake On LAN utility – EMCO WakeOnLAN FREE

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IPMon is a free IP monitoring tool that is useful for troubleshooting and monitoring purposes.

There are so many good free packet sniffers. Most noteworthy are Network Monitor, Wireshark , and SmartSniff. IPMon is a much simpler tool. Although it does not even allow you to view the payload of IP packets, this free IP monitoring tool can be useful in situations where a full-blown packet sniffer would be overkill.

IPMon, which belongs to the NT Toolkit suite, is available as a command line utility and GUI tool (IPMon+) for Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, and OS X. The utility monitors all IP traffic on local network interfaces.

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This article discusses the new IPv6 features of IPsec support, automatic address assignment, and the neighbor discovery function of the ICMPv6 protocol that will replace ARP.

In the last post of this series, I discussed the new IPv6 features Quality of Service (QoS), hierarchical addressing, and the new address space. In this post, I talk about some of the new IPv6 features that are most relevant for Windows admins.

Mandatory IPsec support

The IPv6 specification mandates support for IPsec (Internet Protocol security). IPv6 supporters often claim that this will improve overall security on the Internet. Since IPsec for IPv4 is optional, proprietary VPN solutions are ubiquitous. However, I believe, the main reason why IPsec deployments are rare is because configuration is relatively complicated. Thus, I doubt somehow that we will see significantly more IPsec deployments because of IPv6.

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The new IPv6 features that are most often discussed are the new large address space, hierarchical addressing, and Quality of Service (QoS).

In the last post of my IPv6 series, I outlined the main reason why you should now get started with IPv6: IPv6 will come soon to your network whether you like it or not. Network engineers have a few other reasons to offer, and this is the topic of the next two articles. The new IPv6 features are not really new because the protocol has already existed for more than 10 years. For this reason, I won’t just repeat the feature descriptions, which you can read on countless other sites, but I will outline my view about the significance of these enhancements.

Large address space

While the other new IPv6 features are all nice to have, the new large address space is certainly the main (perhaps the only) reason why IPv6 will come. An IPv4 address consists of 32 bits; the IPv4 address space, therefore, allows 2³² addresses. An IPv6 address is four times as long and has 128 bits. Thus, in theory, IPv6 allows 2¹²⁸ = 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456 addresses. This corresponds to 655,570,793,348,866,943,898,599 (6.5×10²³) addresses for every square meter of the Earth’s surface.

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FTPUse is a free FTP client for Windows 7, Vista and XP that allows you to map active and passive FTP connections on the command line.

Submitted by Ferro Software

FTPUse enables you to easily map your FTP server folder as a drive on your Windows PC. After a drive is mapped, the drive letter that you assigned during the mapping appears in Windows Explorer and command-line console. The drive functions just like local hard drives and is available to Windows and all installed programs.

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You still have no clue about IPv6? Read this and get convinced to start learning IPv6 now.

You’ve probably heard the news that the Internet is in trouble. The last block of IP addresses has been assigned by the Regional Internet Registries. However, considering that NAT is an efficient mechanism to remedy the shortage of public IP addresses, we won’t really experience problems any time soon.

IPv4 address shortage

But this is only true for the developed countries. Developing countries, especially the emerging markets, are only at the beginning of building up their Internet infrastructure. For them, NAT probably is not really a solution because you need at least a certain number of public IP addresses to be able to communicate efficiently with the rest of the world. Hence, these countries probably will start introducing IPv6 quickly now.

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FastResolver is a free tool that allows you to resolve IP addresses very quickly. The utility can also translate host names to IP addresses and retrieve MAC addresses.

FastResolver is another portable NirSoft tool that is quite simple but can also be very useful in some situations. You can either resolve a range of IP addresses or provide a list of IP addresses.

The latter feature can be helpful if your firewall or web server doesn’t log domain names because of performance reasons. FastResolver is a multithreaded application, which makes it very quick.

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"There is an IP address conflict with another system on the network." Have you seen this error message before? Or maybe this one: "Windows has detected an IP address conflict?" In this post, you will learn how to avoid IP address conflicts in your network.

Perhaps the fact that IPv4 addresses are sold out will increase the likelihood of IP address conflicts. You know, humans are strange creatures. Whenever there is a shortage of a certain resource, that resource becomes more valuable to everyone, even for those who don’t really need it. Maybe some of your users have heard that IP addresses are rare these days and have started collecting them for hard times. Considering that public IP addresses are unique makes them even more valuable for collectors.

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The SolarWinds free Wake-on-LAN tool allows you to power up remote computers by sending magic packets.

Wake-on-LAN (WOL) is a magic technology that allows you to “wake up” remote computers that are powered off. The problem with magic is that many things can go wrong if you are only a sorcerer’s apprentice. I guess even Harry Potter wouldn’t always succeed with firing magic packets through his magic wand at sleeping calculation monsters.

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TCPEye, the free GUI alternative to the Windows netstat command, has some additional nice features, such as a live netstat display, a VirusTotal interface and a GeoIP tool that shows the location of the selected IP address on a map.

There are many alternatives to the Windows netstat command that essentially have the same features with the comfort of a GUI. It is worth having a closer look at TCPEye because it not only has a nice user interface but also some useful additional features.

Like the Windows netstat command TCPEye shows you the remote IP addresses and the open TCP ports. One difference is to the netstat command is that TCP/IP is the live display.

What I like most is the VirusTotal interface. If you detect suspicious processes on a computer, you can upload the program to VirusTotal through TCPEye’s context menu to learn the opinions that major antivirus tools have about the file.

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The easy-to use free Xirrus Wi-Fi Inspector allows you to search and troubleshoot Wi-Fi conections by providing you quite a few valuable data about the the reachable Wi-Fi networks.

Xirrus Wi-Fi Inspector is a free tool that allows you to search Wi-Fi networks, manage and troubleshoot Wi-Fi connections, verify Wi-Fi coverage, locate Wi-Fi devices, and detect rogue access points.

The user interface is self-explanatory if you are familiar with Wi-Fi concepts. The first thing that catches your eye is the radar display. Honestly, I think this display is a joke. You can do a lot of things with software, but somehow I doubt that you can build rotating radar antennas with it. Xirrus admits that the orientation of networks around the circle does not indicate actual angle of location. All this diagram does is give you a graphical overview of the signal strength of the Wi-Fi access points around you.

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HoverIP is GUI (graphical user interface) for ipconfig, nslookup, routing table, ping, traceroute, port scanning.

HoverIP is GUI (graphical user interface) for a free portable set of IP tools. You can view the IP configuration, launch nslookup queries, view and modify the routing table, ping hosts, use traceroute with a GUI, and do some basic port scans.

HoverIP hasn’t been updated for several years; however, the tool also works fine on Windows 7 and Windows PE 3.0.

Many comparable tools are available, and some have more functions. I like to add HoverIP to the 4sysops list of free admin tools because it is lightweight, portable, and has all the IP tools admins most often.

Note that the tool comes with an installer; however, you can just copy its folder from the Programs directory to your flash drive and launch it from there without installation on other Windows computers.

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