It’s been 30 years since IPv6 was first introduced to the world by the IETF as a solution to the IPv4 address exhaustion problem. In 2026, worldwide adoption of IPv6 by ISPs and client software vendors varies, but is not great overall.
But even for operating systems released around the time of IPv6’s introduction, we can get them speaking IPv6 and talking to the public internet without NAT!
For the retro part of my home network, I have Windows 2000 Server running Active Directory, DNS, and DHCP servers on the retro VLAN. I was running this on Proxmox, but wanted to move this over to my Debian server running libvirt.
Rather than try to migrate the actual virtual machine, I installed a new instance of Windows 2000 Server under libvirt and added it as a Domain Controller.
libvirt has support for legacy operating systems, but its default configurations are not optimal and will cause difficulties.
With my Dell Dimension XPS T450 ready hardware-wise, I needed to get some operating systems installed. My ideal setup is triple-booting Windows 98, NT Workstation 4, and 2000 Professional. This isn’t as straight forward as you’d imagine and it took me more than one total reformat to get it working. This is a tale of many, many failures finally leading to some success.
