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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."
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.
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.
I telnet into his too, though I just capture his traffic.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.