Kirkian Computing

Tag: IPv6

  • IPv4 exhaustion (2022)

    Today is the 10th anniversary of World IPv6 Launch. IPv6 has been around since the 1990s, but some organisations were hesitant about using it for their websites. So, World IPv6 Day (in June 2011) was an opportunity for these organisations to enable IPv6 for 24 hours. That way, if anything broke then it would probably affect all these sites rather than just one, and therefore it would be obvious that the problem was related to IPv6 connectivity in general rather than Facebook (or whatever) in particular. Also, these problems would only be temporary, for the duration of the 24 hour test. This event was successful, so it was followed by World IPv6 Launch in June 2012: this was when lots of companies would enable IPv6 and then leave it turned on permanently.

    Meanwhile, ISPs (Internet Service Providers) are gradually making IPv6 available to more customers (in parallel with IPv4). Google have statistics for IPv6 adoption, showing the percentage of their users who connect to Google services over IPv6; this includes the Google search engine, along with Gmail, YouTube, etc. Globally, that’s now up to 38%, with the UK on 44%, the USA on 50%, and France in the lead on 71%.

    So, this is a good time to summarise the current state of IPv4 exhaustion; what does it mean, and how significant is it? In brief, we’re now at the point where UK ISPs can’t get any new IPv4 addresses; they’re almost at the point of operating a “one in, one out” system, i.e. they’ll have to reclaim addresses from old customers in order to issue them to new customers.

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  • Windows FTP clients

    I’ve recently been setting up a new FTP server, and I wanted it to support FTPS. However, I ran into a few problems when I tested it, which turned out to be partly due to the client software I was using. I’ve been using CuteFTP for several years: I registered for version 1.0 back in 2001, and I’ve been using version 8 since 2007. However, I’m now abandoning that in favour of FileZilla.

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  • Native IPv6 in dd-wrt

    As I mentioned in a previous post, I installed dd-wrt (kernel 2.6, VOIP, build 14896) on my wireless router (Linksys WRT320N), which connected to a VDSL modem using PPPoE. After that, it worked fine for IPv4, so I had the same functionality as the original Linksys firmware. However, the purpose of the exercise was to get IPv6 support: this turned out to be easier said than done. I was eventually able to get it working, so if you only want the short answer and aren’t interested in all the troubleshooting steps that I went through, scroll down to the Conclusion section at the bottom of this post.

    Please refer to my IPv6 router post to get an overview of what I’m trying to achieve here. Most of the documentation that I’ve found assumes that you’re using a tunnel: this is similar to a proxy server, where you have an IPv4 connection to a machine on the internet, then that machine connects to your real destination using IPv6. However, I have native IPv6 connectivity from my ISP.

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  • IPv6 router

    As I’ve mentioned before, I switched my home ISP to A&A so that I could get IPv6 on my internet connection. That gave me 2 pieces of the puzzle (OS support and internet connection), but I still needed to sort out my network infrastructure, specifically my router. This post says what I’m trying to achieve, and it would apply to any router, regardless of the hardware/software involved. I’ll save the details of how I actually went about it for other posts, which are specific to the particular equipment.

    On the client side, this should all be invisible. Someone should be able to turn up with a suitable device (e.g. an iPad or a laptop running Windows) and automatically get IPv6 internet access without having to do anything extra. They may have to type in the key for the wireless network, but that’s the same for IPv4 and IPv6. Similarly, they shouldn’t notice whether they’re accessing a particular site (e.g. Facebook) over IPv4 or IPv6; the only visible difference should be that IPv6-only sites (e.g. Loops of Zen) are now available, whereas they weren’t before. I’ve bought an iPad app to help me with my testing (IPv6 Toolkit) but that’s just a diagnostic tool and you don’t need it to actually use IPv6. In fact, as of IOS 9, it’s a requirement for all iPad apps to support IPv6.

    On the router side, I want feature parity between IPv4 and IPv6 (where it makes sense). For instance, NAT (Network Address Translation) is a necessary evil in IPv4 and I’ll be glad to see the back of it, so I don’t want an IPv6 equivalent (NAT66). However, if a router says that it supports IPv6 and PPPoE then I expect it to support IPv6 over PPPoE. I also expect to be able to ping IPv6 addresses; I’d prefer to use the same command (ping) for both IPv4 and IPv6, but I don’t mind if I have to use separate commands (e.g. ping6 in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5) as long as the functionality is built in.

    I would like to have some kind of firewall built into the router (e.g. ip6tables), but that’s not essential; if necessary, I’m willing to use a separate device for that.

    When I set up a router for an IPv4 xDSL (ADSL/VDSL) internet connection, I don’t have to type in the public IPv4 address: that comes from the ISP. In a similar way, I would like an IPv6 router to pick up the equivalent IPv6 address range automatically. However, if I have to type in the router’s IPv6 address manually then I can live with that; this is just a one-off job until I change my internet connection, rather than something I’d have to do on a daily basis.

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  • Installing dd-wrt on a Linksys WRT320N wireless router

    Back in 2011 I switched ISPs to A&A, primarily because they support native IPv6. Incidentally, 3 years on I see that you still can’t get IPv6 from Zen, so I made the right choice by switching.

    Windows has had IPv6 support included by default since 2006 (i.e. Vista onwards), so the missing piece of the puzzle was my wireless router (a Linksys WRT320N). Unfortunately, the built-in firmware doesn’t support IPv6. (Source: Linksys devices that support IPv6.)

    So, I investigated open source alternatives. There are a few different firmware projects out there, which all seem to be based on Linux. According to the OpenWRT wiki, it isn’t supported on the WRT320N. However, the WRT320N is listed in the dd-wrt router database, so I chose that instead. JP Hellemons wrote about this in 2010 (How I upgraded my Linksys WRT320N to DD-WRT v24); he also checked Tomato and HyperWRT, and neither of those were compatible. However, apparently the NoUSB edition of Tomato USB does support the WRT320N.

    Update (2019-03-15): OpenWRT does now claim to support the WRT320N, although they don’t recommend it. Meanwhile, the Tomato USB website is now inactive, because the developer has ceased work on that distribution.

    Just to forewarn anyone else who’s in a similar position, this isn’t a simple process. Here’s a good (valid) rant about how complex it is. I heard a good phrase a while ago: “Open source software is only free if your time is worthless.” I.e. if you assume that your time is valuable, consider how long it will take you to get a system working. Is it worth paying money to save yourself some time? For instance, in this case I could replace my router with a different model that has IPv6 support built in. (You will still need to invest some time in learning any system, but maybe you could reduce that from a day to an hour.)

    In brief, I (eventually) got the router working fine with dd-wrt over IPv4. IPv6 took a bit longer; I’ve elaborated on that in another post (Native IPv6 in dd-wrt).

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  • VDSL

    I’ve recently swapped ISP, from Zen to Andrew & Arnold. More specifically, I had an ADSL line from Zen, and I now have a VDSL line from A&A; this uses FTTC (Fibre To The Cabinet), which BT have just deployed in my local exchange. I’m happy with the new service, and it’s definitely faster than what I had before: according to Broadband Speed Checker my download speed is 24368 Kbps, whereas it was about 3500 Kbps before. Unfortunately, the transfer didn’t go smoothly, and I wound up with no internet connection for eight days; I had to rely on my Orange mobile broadband dongle, which is roughly equivalent to dial-up speed. I’m not quite sure what went wrong, but there was definitely a failure to communicate somewhere along the line. If you’re considering a similar move, this post should give you an idea of what to expect.

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