mjg59: IPv6 routers

Matthew Garrett (

mjg59) wrote,
@ 2011-06-08 09:17 pm UTC

Entry tags:

IPv6 routers

I have a WRT-54G. I've had it for some years. It's run a bunch of different firmware variants over that time, but they've all had something in common. There's no way to configure IPv6 without editing text files, installing packages and punching yourself in the face repeatedly. Adam blogged about doing so today, and I suspect he may be in need of some reconstructive surgery now.

I spent yesterday looking at disassembled ACPI tables and working out the sequence of commands the firmware was sending to the hard drive. I'm planning on spending tomorrow writing x86 assembler to parse EFI memory maps. I spend a lot of time caring about stupidly awkward implementation details worked out from staring at binary dumps. The last thing I want to do is have to spend more than three minutes working out how to get IPv6 working on my home network because that cuts into the time I can spend drinking to forget.

Thankfully this is the future and punching yourself in the face is now an optional extra rather than bundled. Recent versions of Tomato USB (ie, newer than actually released) have a nice web UI for this. I registered with Tunnelbroker.net, got a tunnel, copied the prefix and endpoint addresses into the UI, hit save and ever since then NetworkManager has given me a routable IPv6 address. It's like the future.

Because I'm lazy I ended up getting an unofficial build from here. The std built doesn't seem to include IPv6, so I grabbed the miniipv6 one. The cheat-sheet for identifying builds is here. And I didn't edit a single text file. Excellent.

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cjwatson
2011-06-09 11:02 am UTC (link)

My Netgear router is sufficiently elderly that, although it does at least run Linux and has some pretence at available source code for its firmware and such, OpenWRT doesn't really support it (I think it works but without wifi, or something amazingly useful like that) and building modified versions of the manufacturer's firmware is rather more work than I'm prepared to go to. I already have a separate server that all my devices are configured to treat as the gateway anyway (since otherwise using a VPN was excessively painful), so I made that be the HE endpoint.

tunnelbroker.net is indeed very nice.

I think I'm going to switch to A&A soon, though, as they've actually got to the point of having a real native IPv6 consumer router now ...

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