SixXS Heartbeat Client : Windows Client

Login

One has to type in his/her NIC Handle along with their password. This logs you into the SixXS Configuration Service with a MD5-HMAC encrypted password so even though it is a cleartext IPv4 connection your password is not revealed.

The "No account yet? Signup!" option can be used to directly access the SixXS signup page.

The "Lost your password?" option will open the SixXS Password Reset page.

Selecting "Automatic login" and then pressing the OK button will cause one to automatically login into the service next time the program gets run.

Tunnel Selection

This dialog allows one to select the tunnel they want to use for this machine.

Selecting "Automatic select" and then pressing the OK button will cause one to automatically select this service next time the program gets run. Non-heartbeat tunnels are listed but can't be used, a message will indicate that. In the future it will be possible to use static tunnels. If you want to convert your tunnel from a static to a heartbeat tunnel, email the SixXS staff.

The "Need an additional tunnel? Request it!" option will bring you to the Tunnel Request page. You will still need to login seperately onto the website though.

Tunnel Information

This dialog shows the settings for the tunnel which are used for configuration. Hitting the enable button will automatically configure the tunnel using netsh.

After the tunnel is enabled the client will also start sending heartbeats to the PoP enabling the tunnel at that end and bringing the tunnel up.

The "Disable" button allows one to unconfigure the tunnel and stop the heartbeat. Note that the standard Close Window button (X) only hides the window and doesn't shutdown the program. Use the traybar menu to issue quit.

The "Move Local Endpoint" button exists for future usage with static tunnels.

The right side also contains a few hyperlinks to respectively the PoP's website, the PoP's Information page, the tunnel information page containing the settings, latency and traffic graphs. Last but not least a direct link to the SixXS contact page in case of troubles or questions.

Traybar icon

There will be a icon in your traybar, which, when enabled, will blink to a heart, shown at the right, for a few moments indicating that the heartbeats are being sent. Note that the icon comes available after selecting the tunnel.

 

NAT Support

Many hosts are not directly connected to the IPv4 internet but are connected using a NAT (Network Address Translation) boxes. These are usually small boxes sold as "routers", though they do kinda 'route' they are not real routers. Most popular Operating Systems also include NAT functionality, on the Windows platform it is called ICS (Internet Connection Sharing) and there are also some standalone seperatly-sold products, Linux uses the MASQUERADE function of iptables and the several BSD variants have the NAT Daemon (natd). If your computer is one of the Operating Systems's above you should be running the client on that machine, request a subnet and give your complete network IPv6 connectivity.

The main goal of the NAT system is to make it possible to let multiple computers 'share' one or more public IPv4 addresses. Many ISP's only give out 1 IPv4 address to endusers thus this setup has become a very common scenario. The machines behind the NAT will receive addresses from the RFC1918 ranges, 10.0.0.0/8, 172.16.0.0/12 and 192.168.0.0/16.

Though the big advantage is that you now can access the internet from multiple computers at the same time it also breaks one of the greatest functions of the internet: End-to-End connectivity.

End-to-End connectivity means that a machine can directly communicate with another machine without doing odd tricks. Both machines require a public address for this which one doesn't have with a NAT.

The heartbeat client detects when the local IPv4 address, used for terminating the tunnel is a RFC1918 address and warns the user that the NAT gateway has to be configured properly to forward the protocol 41 packets from the PoP to this host. Read the manual that came with your NAT product on how to accomplish this. Usually the product supports an option to direct all incoming data to a specific host behind the NAT.

If you are sure that you are indeed behind a NAT and that you have configured your NAT gateway properly you can enable the tunnel using the "Enable" button or the "Configure" button when using a static tunnel.

Selecting the "Behind NAT" option checkbox the dialogs from being popped up.

tinc support

Currently in internal beta test is the new Heartbeat client that supports the building of tinc tunnels next to the defacto protocol 41 tunnels (6in4/sit: simple internet transition/six in tunnel). As the tinc protocol can run over both normal UDP or TCP protocols it should enable to use SixXS PoPs from anywhere on the internet as long as you can connect to the PoP using either UDP or TCP. This does also mean that when you are behind a firewall or NAT that doesn't support IPv6 one can still use SixXS using this method.

Another advantage of tinc tunnels is the fact that they are encrypted thus there is no (simple) way of sniffing and deciphering the communication between the client and the PoP.

Registry Settings

Like most Windows applications the Heartbeat also stores it's configuration settings in the Windows Registry. The Heartbeat tool stores it under:

The following strings (REG_SZ) will be stored there: