My ISP, Skynet Belgacom Proximus, has been rolling out IPv6 since 2013. However, you need a B-Box 3 in order to get it. Recently, my B-Box 2 decided to stop working, so I got a (free) upgrade to a B-Box 3 (but see below).
Posts tagged ‘IPv6’
I’ve been struggling a bit with IPv6 source address selection. Normally, when you initiate a new connection, you only specify the destination address (or have DNS resolve the name to an address). The choice of the source address is usually left to the OS by setting it to :: (IPv6’s version of 0.0.0.0).
RFC 6724 specifies how this selection should happen. Karl Auer explains it in a bit less painful way on his blog. But sometimes I want to influence the chosen address: how can I twist these rules to match my wishes? Karl also has an interesting post on this. In summary, use any combination of:
- Deprecate the addresses that you don’t want to use:
ip addr change 2001:db8::1:1/128 dev tun preferred_lft 0 - Make your own label to group addresses:
ip addrlabelfamily - Use privacy extension addresses
As mentioned before, when switching to IPv6 (or more realistically, to dual stack) one of the things that might not work out of the box is VPNs. I decided to put some effort in it to get it to work anyway.
Together with most of the internet, we tested IPv6 on World IPv6 day last week. I won’t go into details on what IPv6 is and why it’s important. Although IPv6 has been tested intensely in isolated networks, this is the first time it was tested on such a large scale. Technically, the participants would just add AAAA-records for their websites to DNS. This small change causes a huge effect. Since most browsers are configured to prefer IPv6 AAAA-records over IPv4 A-records, this causes all IPv6-connected users to suddenly connect over IPv6 instead of IPv4.
For the most part, this major changeover happened without as much of a hitch. In fact, if I hadn’t known it was World IPv6 day, I wouldn’t have noticed anything. But I’m not a normal web-user, so I did notice some issues.
Continue reading ‘World IPv6 day – lessons learned’ »
Although the big builds of dd-wrt contain IPv6 support, it doesn’t support ip6tables. Hence, I choose to use the mini build (which gives me the most free space) and add the missing parts myself. I shamelessly used OpenWRT modules to save me the trouble of figuring out how to compile each library. (Unfortunately, my router isn’t supported by OpenWRT, so I need to stay with dd-wrt for the base system).
Continue reading ‘Adding IPv6 support to dd-wrt’ »
Since none of the dd-wrt releases include ip6tables support, I added it myself. The standard kernel does support module loading, so you can simply add additional kernel features without reflashing the device. You do need some writable storage. I use the remaining 4MB of flash using JFFS, but using an external storage (USB, network, …) is also possible.
Since you can’t run a complete build environment on the router itself, you’ll have to set up a cross-compiling environment on your own machine. As I found out, this isn’t always very easy to do…
Continue reading ‘Compiling custom dd-wrt kernel modules’ »
I bought myself a new WiFi router. When in the shop, I specifically searched for a router that is supported by dd-wrt, and has (at least) 8MB of flash. I settled for the Linksys WRT320N: it has a dual band (switchable between 2.4GHz and 5GHz, not simultaneous) 802.11a/b/g/n radio, a 4 port GbE switch, and a WAN port. It houses a Broadcom BC4717 processor running at 354MHz, 8MB of flash and 32MB of RAM.
The default Linksys firmware is actually not bad, but dd-wrt just offers a ton more features: Multiple SSIDs, IPv6 support (including Sixxs tunneling), WAN volume monitoring, custom firewalling, traffic shaping, … So I decided to void my warranty and put my router on steroids! Mandatory note: this may very well turn your router in to a very expensive brick.
It is perfectly possible to configure a linux server (or workstation if you wish) to talk IPsec. The Linux Advanced Routing & Traffic Control site has a page describing it. Since IPsec is a standard protocol, I wanted to get a tunnel up and running between a linux host and a Cisco router: with success! Here are the config files that I used in this test:
IPv6 is, big surprise, the new version of IP. The current internet runs on IPv4, which has some drawbacks. Practically both versions are the same: they allow connections from one host to another host. Technically however, there are some major differences, most notably the enlarged address space. For the moment, most hosts will run a dual-stack configuration.
I decided that it was time to implement IPv6 on my home network and get a IPv6 connection to the IPv6-Internet.
