IPv6

IPv6 is coming fast, so I decided it was time to get ready for it. It has been quite an adventure.

First, I signed up for a 6in4 tunnel broker service with Hurricane Electric, because my ISP is not yet ready for true IPv6. Almost immediately, I discovered that the modem/router supplied to me by my ISP doesn’t support it, either. So, I started searching for a reasonably priced IPv6-capable router. While doing that search, I found that my current wireless router, which I had been using as a simple wireless access point, could have its firmware flashed with an open source project called dd-wrt and it would then be able to support IPv6.

That also necessitated reconfiguring the topology of my LAN. In order to use my wireless router as the LAN router, I had to bridge my modem and plug its output to the wireless router. All the client hosts on my LAN then had to receive new DHCP assignments. Luckily, this step was easier than I had envisioned.

So, I rather quickly got IPv6 running well on a single client host, with its LAN NAT address assigned as the tunnel endpoint. I was pretty happy with that for a few days, until I realized that what I really wanted was for the wireless router to be the tunnel endpoint so that all my LAN hosts could participate in IPv6. This part of the project took me about a week of much trial and error and a lot of frustration. I had to learn to install and run scripts and configuration files on the router. But, finally, with lots of help from some great people in web technical forums, I got it all working.

Its all pretty cool!

This entry was posted on March 4, 2011 at 11:39 am and is filed under Technical fun. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.