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IPv6 for the Linksys WRT54G
AndersBrownworth writes "Earthlink Research and Development has released a firmware load for the Linksys WRT54G wireless access point that supports end-to-end IPv6. They suggest features such as extremely large address space, stateless autoconfiguration and low cost restoration of end-to-end addressability will revolutionize IP communications. It would be interesting if releases like this significantly boost the IPv6 take-up rate but as far as I know, Earthlink doesn't supply end-to-end IPv6 yet."
With the firmware being so easily changed, you can run just about anything on it.
I mean, I telnet into mine right now and review settings.. Which I love.
There is a list of firmware at wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WRT54G
Proceed with Format (Y/N)? Y
For the great unwashed masses, using IPV6 will mean that:
1) Their ISP supports it
2) The Windoze protocol stack uses it.
I know that Linux on my machine has an IPV6 stack available, but do any commercial ISPs deliver connectivity? It isn't exactly something they put in their TV ads.
"Sic Semper Path of Least Resistance"
I really need that new address space. I mean, there are only 16842752 addresses in the 10.x.x.x and 192.168.x.x address spaces. With the 15 million wireless devices I keep in my home, I was starting to get worried!
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
Some people think incremental steps like this will somehow help IPv6 rollout worldwide. I think that is a completely different problem, and very hard to solve. Any volunteers to solve the hard and difficult problem?
The best description I know about The Problem comes from Dan Bernstein, The IPv6 mess.
The IPv6 designers don't have a transition plan. They've taken some helpful steps, but they typically declare success (``IPv6 support'') when the real problem---making public IPv6 addresses work just as well as public IPv4 addresses---still hasn't been solved.
This thread will of course trigger a bunch of replies from people saying we don't need IPv6, but in fact, we do, badly, and the need is only increasing with time.
NAT helps somewhat, but if you're using NAT your computer can't receive incoming connections. That's a problem for servers, for peer-to-peer networking, for games, and for VoIP. Home users can usually work around this with their firewall configuration, but businesses usually can't (one important reason being that only one computer behind the firewall can receive connections this way, not multiple). And, as someone pointed out in the last IPv6-related thread, merging the networks of two corporations is a nightmare - they both use the same IP addresses.
There are theoretically 4 billion IP addresses total. That sounds like a lot, but an IP address isn't just a number which can be assigned individually; what you do is hand out big consecutive blocks of them, so that routers can say things like "for 123.231.*.*, send packets in this direction". The shortage of IP addresses has introduced lots of special cases, so that internet routers need tons of memory and processing power to figure out the mess.
Finally, switching to IPv6 cuts off one of the major ways worms propagate. The Sapphire worm, for example, worked by picking a random IP address and trying to infect it, repeating for a whole bunch of IPs, and it was able to double every 7 seconds. That works because the odds of finding a computer (not necessarily a vulnerable computer) is about 10%. With IPv6, that changes to 10^-28% - instead of doubling the number of infected computers every 7 seconds, it would've scanned for a few years, never find a single computer, and get disinfected.
Is IPv6 a tool looking for a job to do?
It's not a chicken-and-egg thing, where everyone would do it if there were only the infrastructure, but there's no infrastructure because no one's doing it yet. At least, it doesn't seem that way to me.
IPv6 came about when the Internet exploded in the early 90's. Folks looked at the address space and said "Hey, we're running out of room!"
The solution in IPv6 was to use 128-bit addresses instead of 32-bit ones, and to design the next gen of protocols using the lessons learned from the previous one. TCP/IPv4 was designed in an era when security was not in as much focus as it is now.
It seems like about two minutes after IPv6 began to be developed, the world discovered NAT and firewalls. We'd always had routers with private networks, but NAT made it possible for mortals to set up. A whole company with thousands or millions of IP addresses can be hidden behind a very small set of IPv4 addresses.
That solution has worked so well that few feel the need to use IPv6.
I wonder what will happen to force the issue?
Raise your children as if you were teaching them to raise your grandchildren, because you are.