Regular upgrades will keep up with the ever growing contribution to the Linux system. Since routing issues are among the most important research interests concerning IPv6, our network stack is intended to accomodate both host and router IPv6 machines. Besides implementing the router specification of the IPv6 protocol, a great deal of effort was also put into the developpement of RIPng into GateD . As of today, the IPv6-DRET implementation makes it possible to start studying issues such as the impact of IPv6 mechanisms on multimedia applications transmission for example. Basically, ifconfig allows to configure IPv6 interface addresses for the loopback, SIT and Ethernet devices.
Ping is a useful tool to check if the route between two hosts of the Internet is up.
Traceroute , as its name indicates, traces the route between two hosts and reports the routers messages go through to reach a given machine. RIPng is a package for dynamic management of routing tables in an IPv6 networking environment. For instance, most of today's routes across the 6Bone are maintained manually. While this is possible with few nodes in the network, the 6Bone will soon become unmanagable this way. Companies or consortium such as cisco or Merit already use RIPng message to maintain their IPv6 routing tables.