IPv6 learning experiment; help?

[Geofram]

Hey all,

I'm trying to learn IPv6, whereas all my experience previously has been in IPv4. I came up with an idea of something I wanted to try in my home network. Maybe this is impossible, but maybe I'm just doing something wrong. Here's what I decided to try:

I have Windows 2012 R2 Server Essentials with two NICs that runs as a file server/domain controller.

I wanted to see if I could set up one of the NICs to run IPv6 exclusively, and the other to run IPv4 exclusively. I then wanted to see if I could set the file shares to only run on IPv6, so that any of my client computers that have both enabled on their NICs would connect on the IPv6 NIC when hitting a file share, while hitting the IPv4 NIC when doing normal DNS/Internet stuff.

No, I don't expect this to make any difference in performance. I just wanted to see if it was possible to do, and hopefully learn something in the process.

I tried to set this up by disabling IPv4 on one of the server NICs, and disable IPv6 on the other. I then disabled "File and Printer Sharing for Microsoft Networks" on the IPv4 NIC while making sure it was enabled on the other.

Instead of forcing the clients to use IPv6 to connect to the share, all this seems to do is make the other computers not see the shares at all. If I attempt to ping the server using IPv6 (ping -6 "server name") it comes back immediately with a message that it can't find it. So it looks like DNS resolution over IPv6 doesn't know host names.

Is there something I need to set to make this work? Or is it just too convoluted of an idea to be worth trying?

 

[Mushkins]

There's too much missing information here to really get an idea of whats going on, but at first glance it sounds like a DNS issue: aka "Server01" is in the DNS cache with either the ipv4 address OR the ipv6 address, not both. You might be able to do what you're looking to do in a domain environment with your 2012 box acting as the primary DNS server if you made two A records for "Server01", one with the ipv4 and one with the ipv6, but who knows what other sorts of issues that could ultimately cause. You pretty much summed it up when you asked if this was too convoluted of an idea to be worth trying, there is no reason to ever do this in a production environment. If you want to learn IPv6, turn off v4 across the whole network and run v6 exclusively, then have at.

 

[Geofram]

If you want to learn IPv6, turn off v4 across the whole network and run v6 exclusively, then have at.

Is there a way to do that, that won't end up breaking the internet (which is IP4 only here)? I've read about 6to4, but never tried setting something like that up.

 

[Emulex]

just enable ipv6 and ipv4 on the same interface bro, that is how it is supposed to work.

run your dhcpd/v6 , dns server (w/ipv6), etc - remember there is only one huge subnet in ipv6 for discovery which mucks up a few bits