| IPv6 Network - MacOS |
Under MacOS X, IPv6 has been available since version 10.2 Jaguar. MacOS differs from other operating systems in that IPv6 is enabled by default. However, because MacOS X doesn’t expose any services to the network by default, there is little need for an IPv6 firewall. IPv6 support in Jaguar is fairly marginal as there is no way to enable/disable and configure the protocol by using the regular (graphical) system configuration tools. This was changed in MacOS 10.3 Panther, where IPv6 is controlled with the Network preference pane in the System Preferences. Select the appropriate interface and click TCP/IP, which brings up a window where both IPv4 and IPv6 can be configured, as shown in Figure 2-4. If IPv6 is enabled and the interface is active, an IPv6 address will be present at “IPv6 Address.” This can be a global address if one could be configured from router advertisements or a link-local address if a global address isn’t available.
IPv6 can be disabled or manually configured by clicking the Configure IPv6... button. Additionally, it is possible to turn off IPv4 and use IPv6 exclusively by selecting Off at Configure IPv4. In this case, it’s important to list one or more IPv6 addresses for DNS servers that are available over IPv6 because otherwise, the system can’t resolve names as there is currently no way to discover IPv6 DNS servers automatically. The graphical MacOS tools don’t believe in compressing unnecessary zeros in IPv6 addresses, so the addresses may look a bit different than usual. You can find out where the listed IPv6 address came from by hovering the mouse pointer over it.
Under MacOS X, the built-in Ethernet interface is usually en0, while the Airport (802.11b) or Airport Extreme (802.11g) interface is en1. Without arguments, ifconfig shows information for all interfaces. Because much of the MacOS UNIX core is derived from FreeBSD, many UNIX commands work almost identically to their FreeBSD counterparts. So for more information about the ifconfig output, see the explanation for the FreeBSD version of the command earlier.
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