Practical IPv6 for the Home via Linksys WRTG54
via Joi Ito’s Web:
David Beckemeyer writes about an R&D activity at Earthlink which has implemented dual IPv4 / IPv6 access on modified firmware for a Linksys WRT54G wireless home gateway router.
The Linksys WRT54G is inexpensive, widely used, and is similar to many other home gateways providing NAT routing and wireless access. (It’s also popular as a platform hacking wireless router code, as it runs Linux internally). After loading the modified firmware, the router still provides IPv4 NAT functionality, but in addition provides a publicly routable /64 IPv6 network, and can directly route to other public IPv6 networks via the experimental Earthlink IPv6 routing service. You do not need to be an Earthlink customer to use the free service.
In general, IPv6 hasn’t been compelling to home users since it’s been obscure, expensive, and didn’t do anything useful for them. Even if one had a computer running IPv6 software, most home users are behind a NAT router. So providing a migration path via the low cost home routers could be a great enabler for actually starting to use IPv6 end-to-end network applications, and could help solve many of the NAT- and QoS-related problems observed in VoIP and video applications.
Here’s how it works: Simply get an account at http://www.research.earthlink.net/ipv6/accounts.html to get your own personal block of 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 IPv6 addresses; install the firmware onto your standard Linksys WRT54G router, and blamo, you have IPv6. With this special code installed on your Linksys router, your IPv4 works as normal; you’ll still have your NAT IPv4 LAN. But in addition to that, any IPv6 capable machine on the LAN will get a real, honest to goodness, routable IPv6 address too. It couldn’t be easier. This works for Mac OS X, Linux/UNIX, as well as Windows XP. You don’t have to do anything special on the machines on the LAN. They just work, as they say.
David adds in a comment on Joi Ito’s post:
We’re not really promising anything with this sandbox (see disclaimers). That said, we don’t expect to have to take these addresses back any time soon. If anything, the main factor that could cause us to have to shut down the testbed would be if the network load or other real costs assocuted with the IPv6 testbed hits the radar of the bean counters.
I’ll have to dig up a WRT54G and give it a try.
Tags: networking, ipv6, earthlink
