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Cisco Linksys Routers Still Don't Support IPv6
Julie188 writes "It's 2011, IPv4 addresses are officially exhausted, and the world's largest router maker, Cisco, still doesn't support IPv6 in its best-selling line of Linksys wireless routers. This is true even for the new E4200 router released just last month (priced at $180). The company has promised to add IPv6 to the E4200 by the spring. But it has not been specific about if and how it will offer an IPv6 upgrade to the millions of other Linksys routers currently running in homes and small businesses."
Yet another reason I'm glad I've always recommended against Linksys to friends and family. Shoddy equipment in the past, and no preparation for the future now.
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dd-wrt FTW
The IPv4 exhaustion issue is trumpeted as a reason to provide IPv6 support. But the exhaustion is purely at the NIC level at this point. It hasn't reached a single end user yet. It'll take years for people to start caring about this much. By that time, the current product line will be swapped out for new gear.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
What motivation would Cisco possibly have for providing firmware updates to old, cheap routers?
99.9% of those Linksys routers will have no need to run IPv6 in their effective lifetime. When did people develop this sense of entitlement that every little cheap-ass consumer product they buy ought to be future-proof?
You can in fact use IPv6 on Linksys routers supporting custom firmwares, while it's still not exactly direct factory support it's not exactly impossible either.
Go easy on them, Cisco is such a small company and really there was no way they could have seen this coming.
"In America, first you get the sugar, then you get the power, then you get the women..." -H. Simpson
if the modem supports ip6
when is the toaster manufacturer going to send me a free upgrade?
Cisco has always been way over rated IMHO...
One thing for sure though they have huge ego and people becoming so-called Cisco "Experts" do as well....
Pardon me if this sounds amazingly ignorant, but why does the average person or small business need IPv6 connectivity? Aren't most ISPs going to do the 4-6 translation for these people?
As well, last I checked Linksys home/small business products don't even support subnets larger than a class C anyway, so anyone using these products probably doesn't have more than 250 devices, let alone enough necessary to require IPv6 internally.
Apple, Netgear, Dlink, etc are offering support for it.
This is why no one wants to switch yet. If the users can't access your sites businesses are not going to judge it very cost effective to make them available on v6.
As the subject says, the only open source DHCPv6 stacks are virtually unmaintained so you really can't be too harsh on Cisco and co
Just run a Linux Distro on it like DD-WRT http://www.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/IPv6
The firmware it comes with is crappy anyway...
*narf!*
I have an old Linksys router and put OpenWRT on it. It supported ipv6 just fine with that firmware on it but ran out of disk space as soon as I tried to add qos support. I went back the the stupidly expensive Cisco branded router that's full of bugs..
meaning it's not going to connect on the big-wacky side of the interwackytubes thing. it's going to be on a 10 network or a 192.168 network and fed by NAT from some host that has bgrp to the real thing. non-story. now, Foundry or Cisco that can't work on IPv6, that's news. 2007 news.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
Seriously, they sell this stuff here and KNOW that those that bought this chinese junk, will be forced to buy it again within another 2 years. Totally sick.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
We're number 1 ... so we don't give a rat's ass.
Ironic that literally the first page I open after flashing a Cisco-Linksys router w/DD-WRT, and finally getting online, is this thread. DD-WRT for the win. IPv6 and so, so much more.
I run a v3 (or was it v4?) router w/ Tomato (http://www.polarcloud.com/tomato/) firmware. Given the nature of GPL firmwares, wouldn't it be possible just to enable IPv6 support in the router? Correct me if I am wrong, this should not be a hardware issue at all, right?
Disappointing a company as large as Cisco to not enable support for IPv6 for the Linksys routers out there. Perhaps this is a sign for other router manufacturers like Buffalo to step up and be the first.
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Wow, I just bought a E2000 literally a month ago, so I can't return it. They better make a firmware update for IPV6, or that will be $70 down the toilet.
DD-WRT
As someone who wanted to test his home router with Comcast IPV6 testing, I was sorely disappointed with the firmware running on my router. Appearently the version I have USED to have some IPV6 support, but recent revs have either broken it, or stopped supporting it.
Cisco doesn't care about Linksys brand. It was simply a marketing decision to buy the company to promote Corporate products. I won't buy Corporate Cisco equipment if I can ever help it. My company is replacing Cisco with much less expensive HP gear and can't be happier.
Do you hear that Cisco, your Microsoft style tactics will let your lessor rivals overtake you.
If you have existing Linksys gear, see if DD-WRT works on it. If it does, you'll get MUCH better support and it is IPV6.
http://www.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/IPV6
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
A slashdot member posted in 2005 (almost six years ago) that he was using a LinkSys router for an ipV6 trial.
Obi-Wan: "I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were sudden
This is really irresponsible on Cisco's part. I don't care about their monetary considerations, adding IPv6 support into their Linux derived routers wouldn't have been all that hard or costly for them.
Their refusal to enable IPv6 support is having a bad effect on IPv6 adoption. I don't think most people realise how bad IPv4 exhaustion can be. IPv4 exhaustion puts a cap on internet growth, which in turn retards economic growth.
Seriously Cisco, fuck you, just fuck you.
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Stinksys
Sounds like a great way to sell more routers. Most people won't understand the details. If some Geek Squad goon says "you need to upgrade your router to support the New Internet(TM)." Most people will pony up the $50 and move on.
Instead of spewing hate, we should be lauding Cisco on their capitalist business savvy. They are going to make loads of money selling people new gear that they otherwise wouldn't need.
Argh! Another IPv6 story..... ...and we're NOT out of IPv4 addresses....
One minute spent on Google using the <irony>completely non-obvious<\irony> search terms of "E4200 ipv6" yielded results of people who upgraded their firmware in January and IPv6 started working (albeit without any config options for it).
My linksys E3000, with whatever factory firmware it had from oct 2010 has IPV6 functionality. (Tested using http://v6.testmyipv6.com/ and http://test-ipv6.com/faq_opera.html, and I can see ipv6 cisco and google sites).
The e4200 might not, but that certainly doesn't mean none of them do.
Thing is at least until the biggest ISP's begin to deploy ipv6, home routers and small office routers aren't need to support IPV6. You can have a good router with IPV6, but if your ISP provider doesn't support it, it will means jack shit. Nothing more and nothing less.
Granted, i don't think Linksys would or can be anything for older models, particularly those with 2MB flash memory and less than 8 MB ram. DD-WRT doesn't support flawlessly IPV6 in these models, due to memory constrains, and with some light testing usually will become unstable.... But newer models should have come with the unit ready for IPV6 already, so yeah... a little irresponsible on their part.
This reminds me of that dilbert strip where Dilbert says that if they build their code perfectly the first time around they would make 10% in return in investment, but they can make 40% back if they make something cheap that requires paid updates. Getting back on topic though, I think there are some models where you can install custom firmware that might support ipv6. I don't know enough about ipv6 to tell you if it's going to be a software or hardware issue, but any time that there's a major upgrade in the infrastructure of -anything- you're pretty much required to buy new hardware. Think of it when we'll transition from DOCSIS 2 to DOCSIS 3. You won't be able to reach the speeds of a DOCSIS 3 with a DOCSIS 2, it's only natural to upgrade. Though, routers tend to only last a few years anyways so it's not that big of a deal. I, myself am a netgear fan after having so much trouble with linksys in the past, but I'm going to be stuck buying a IPV6 router soon since my ISP is offering their consumers to do the switch right now. I'm not going to do it until websites are fully supporting it, I know my website doesn't support it yet (though I hope it will be supported by next month) so anyone with IPV6 might not be able to access it or much of the web elsewhere, at least that's what I hear =/
The first problems I am seeing evidenced in a SMB environment relate to Linux trying to do IPv6 DNS resolution where something is broken between the client machine and DNS server... For some reason the IPv6 version of the request attempted first ends up in /dev/null somehow, there's nothing returned to the client indicating error with the request, nor any response to the request. Once the timeout in /etc/resolv.conf is reached, an IPv4 request is sent and handled correctly. Introduces about a six second delay in first time DNS resolution.
Various suggestions to prevent Linux from using IPv6 are all incomplete or unsuccessful in various ways. Shortening the timeout risks missing slow DNS queries.
It's irritating when the DNS server is mainly beyond your control...
I didn't RTFA, but I know the summary is inaccurate. I saw some other posts about others with Linksys routers with IPv6 and am here to tell you I am one too. I have a WRT610N and have been on IPv6 in the home for a couple years. Comcast turned on the IPv6 for me recently too.
-]Phreak Out[-
The Cisco gift shop is also out of Bort license plates.
Seem to be the Creative Labs of networking - ubiquitous, needlessly expensive, centuries behind the competition yet still inexplicably well regarded. Let me know when their routers that *do* support IPv6 don't collapse in a sodden heap whenever neighbour discovery is mentioned. Of course, that doesn't stop the network droids here standardising on Cisco Everywhere. After all, who needs features?
I bought a Linksys 802.11n wireless router a year ago because enough of my neighbors had upgraded to louder wider-band 802.11n gear and my 802.11g was getting disconnected too often. I finally got around to checking the IPv6 functions, and no, there aren't any, Cisco/Linksys don't say anything about IPv6 in the support pages for the hardware, and googling for it tells me that DD-WRT should work ok. Snarl.... The Cisco web pages seem to imply that the "Restore to Factory Defaults" function doesn't actually restore the operating system to factory defaults, it just resets the network settings and password, and they don't seem to support downloading the old firmware release for that model because they haven't come out with an upgraded one so why would you need that?
Of course, one reason I had bought Cisco (besides the sale price at Fry's) was that the last Netgear router I bought (an 802.11b wireless thing) was a cretinous piece of junk, and while I've liked their Layer 2 hardware for decades, I haven't wanted to touch anything at Layer 3 or above from them until I've got some reason to assume they've Got Better. (It was nice hardware, and a long time ago, so they probably do fine today. After I ditched the Netgear, I got a 3Com 802.11g that gave you a choice of using routing or just raw Ethernet bridging, and the bridging was clean, dumb, and reliable, and I may decide to run IPv6 wireless on it.)
Bill Stewart
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I swapped out my router a year ago, precisely because of 802.11n. Too many of my apartment neighbors had upgraded to higher-powered wider-bandwidth 802.11n, the local spectrum was getting too crowded, and my laptop kept losing connections to my 802.11g, so it was time to upgrade. And no, there's no IPv6 support on it, even though it's less than two years old. It's tempting to do DD-WRT.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Come on now... its been out for 10 years or so now, i'd hardly call a requirement for continued network connectivity post 2010 to be considered an "advanced feature".
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
Out of the box my E4200 gave devices on my network that could support it an IPv6 address I could use to have devices talk to each other or talk to IPv6 sites on the internet. http://test-ipv6.com/ tells me I'm ready to browse the web in IPv6 glory. I didn't do anything to turn it on, didn't upgrade the firmware, didn't even think about it, it just worked.
Are you saying you have native (dual stack) IPv6 at home or do you have 6RD or 6to4? With the latter two, your router is responsible for tunneling your local, real IPv6 through IPv4.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/6to4
With native IPv6 (dual stack), your router actually just forwards (bridges really) IPv6 packets between its two interfaces.
Comcast has turned on 6to4/6RD for everyone nationwide, but I don't think native IPv6 (dual stack) is turned on yet for many (Comcast mentions one persion in Colorado having it as of two weeks ago).
As you can see from the wikipedia article, the WRT610N supports 6to4. But I do not believe it supports native IPv6.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
Cisco's enterprise-class offerings have been crap for years. Do you really think their consumer-class offerings are going to be any better?
I was surprised that TFA stated that the Netgear WNR1000 supported IPv6 since I keep my firmware up to date and have not noticed support. Turns out that the version with IPv6 support, 1.1.2.28, does not appear in the router firmware update page but can be found in the knowledge base at: http://kb.netgear.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/18631/kw/ipv6%20wnr1000
It is a new update as of Feb 3, 2011 and its listed as being for the WNR1000v2 - no mention of the more recent v3. IPv6 compatibility is not mentioned on the product page or the spec sheet.
The strange thing about this is that IPv6 and home routers are a perfect match. With IPv6 and automatic (or very easy) 6to4 configuration, home routers can provide access to inside machines (modulo firewall rules, of course) without using NAT. This means out-of-the-box support for your favorite P2P application. That could be a killer app for IPv6 (if you get IPv6 working you can download your torrent for many more places!). (Of course, there must be more 6to4 gateways as well for this to work properly)
cisco make absolute crap/over priced gear... no idea why anyone would use thier junk.
IPv6 isn't a killer feature today. They won't sell a lot more routers by adding it. However, in the future when people need the feature, they'll sell a ton more routers to support it.
Why would they offer it now and miss out on all the future business?
This is too funny: you realize this is Cisco we're talking about here, right? The company that still requires obscene steps and wads of cash to get security updates for a paid-for product?
I don't mean to flamebait, but seriously. Cisco is one of the most frustrating (large) companies to deal with in this regard. Smaller companies try to do the same things, but ultimately those behaviors turn people off their products. Why is Cisco still bannered about as the end-all, be-all for networking equipment, given that:
* feature for feature, their switches are inferior in many ways to their competetors
* Cisco products have less fabric provisioning than, say, HP switches, which cost a fraction as much (off the top of my head, 30% less fabric at 4x the cost)
* Less usability built into the devices themselves (limited interface feature set). This applies to the 'home' routers, too: the Buffalo home routers are comparable to the Linksys (in some cases, 'identical'), cost less, and have better firmware. And lately, the radios have been better, too (for wireless).
* Getting upgrades for an old Cisco is difficult and costly. "Old" usually means "not a couple years new and doesn't have a current service contract".
I mean, seriously: it still costs how much for a Cisco PIX 50x? We're not even talking about something recent; 501s still sell, new, for over $150. It's no small wonder that small businesses buy things like Sonicwall devices given the alternative in 'name brand networking equipment'.
You can argue that it's worth the money due to comprehensive support, lifetime this or that, or what have you. For most people, upon careful examination, the truth is that Cisco isn't a good value decision.
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Roadrunner doesn't do IPv6. Comcast just started testing it.
This is the classic example of proprietary vs. open-source offering. Linux has it already, and so one can build a Linux based router which contains already its support.
I don't think they care.
Sorry for quoting your posting title to start, but I'd like to add to what you've already touched on here...
Internet switches are far easier and cheaper to produce and with the advent of IPv6, it will be economically feasible for an ISP to provide multiple addresses for a single residence. In this way buying a wireless switch will be much more plausible and cheaper for the user. I.E. something like this:
Step 1: Refuse to support upcoming IPv6 standards.
Step 2: Prolong purchasing of IPv4 routers and similar devices when addresses are in short supply.
Step 3: Continued profit.
We all know that this business model will not last forever and I am certain Cisco does also - they are not a bunch of idiots. But in the same sense, with few ISP's showing an active desire to switch to IPv6 (not talking internet backbone Akamai, Level 3, etc) and a continued profit from IPv4 routers, there is really little incentive other than ethics to support the new standards. (And common sense which is a rare commodity)
It'll take years for people to start caring about this much. By that time, the current product line will be swapped out for new gear.
My thoughts exactly...plus when we finally make the switch, it will be the Cash-For-Clunker-Routers - think of all that potential profit! Shoot... they may even be able to buy futures on their resistance to a natural internet progression. (jokes)
(I really hate playing the devil's advocate, but the market and laws must create an incentive, we know how "morals" work...)
We should start a new Slashdot and return control to the geeks. It actually wouldn't be that hard to get some users to
People have been talking about it for ages. What makes you think it would really now happen? Blah blah! Cheap talk!
I've been dabbling with PFsense and it's also nowhere near dealign with IPV6. Great programmers involved, great software, but they just don't have the manpower, being open source donationware. I suspect all the routers ISP etc companies are going to have a huge race with all the ipv6 stuff. No looking back now.
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Well, Linksys wasn't able to fix a fatal wi-fi flaw in the WAG160N ADSL gateway I bought a couple years ago. It would not keep up a connection to ANY wi-fi device for more than a few minutes at best. Over and over, new firmwares and settings tweaks promised hope... but in the end they never did fix it and a lot of people who bought this model were left in the cold without a fully functioning product. I wasted 6 months on this piece of crap before finally shutting off the wi-fi for good and getting a separate AP to handle wireless duties at home (an Apple Airport Extreme, which by the way has been flawless).
As a result, I will never touch another Linksys or Cisco product. Linksys, at least, do not stand behind their products. They should have issued a recall for this model, it clearly has a hardware or un-fixable software defect but they never admitted fault and obviously never will. On a side note, it has actually been a decent and reliable router, if I discount the wi-fi non-functionality. It's still in use today as my ADSL gateway.
Actually, as this is a router and not a plain switch, they might do the forwarding in hardware, not in software.
This is a somewhat common problem with actual (old) backbone routers, be they by Cisco or anyone else. Though I suspect home routers will do everything in software, anyway.
...no one forces them to support IPv6 in old hardware.
Sure, it sucks if you bought a home router just recently, but you spending extra money has a _lot_ of PHBs drooling in anticipation.
You could run OpenWRT/DD-WRT on your current Linksys to fix this.
Or get an Alix board or RouterBoard if you want to tinker.
But, to be honest, this is your own fault. Don't buy stuff that is obviously not able to fulfill near-term needs. About a year ago, I went for the Fritz!Box 7390 as I knew IPv6 was in the works for that one. Yes, it took some time to research and verify, but hey. Vote with your wallet.
As an aside, TP-Link has very good support for open firmware, as well. They even allow you to flash over their admittedly crappy stock stuff with OpenWRT from their own web UI.
An ISP selling "Internet Access" and providing only a NAT'ed address to their customer is in excuseable, I think we all agree on that. I don't think NAT is alway evil. Even in an IPv6 world I might still wan't to machines to say appear to be on the same subnet, that can't be physically put on the same segment for instance. Yippes you'd need to NAT twice to make that work! Is that use case evil?
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To be honest, I don't know what I'd want a home router to do with IPv6. A firewall would be nice, I guess. And maybe automatically setting up 6to4, and giving out 6to4 addresses?
But if the ISP is handing you a /64, then all it really needs to do is be a passthrough bridge. Each machine gets it's own real honest to goodness public address. Cable modems would certainly need to support it.
(does not hold true for PPP-ish services)
99% of the population can't use IPv6 natively anyways due to most ISP's not offering IPv6 addresses as an option. When this changes, I'm sure Cisco can release a firmware update that enables IPv6 functionality. Personally, I'd rather them spend their time releasing new features and bugfixes for features that I'm already using, than features that look good on paper, but won't actually ever get used in practice.
All you just did was illustrate why globally routeable addresses are important. Consequently, routers were invented for the problem you are describing; to connect multiple networks.. If you need two hosts to appear on the same subnet and they are not, you should explain to us why it's needed, cause otherwise I bet you're doing wrong.
Perhaps slightly off-topic, but why don't people get themselves an alix board with pfsense on it? A third or less of the cost of a comparable device from a big brand. And these things can be ordered pre-everything. Just hook them up to your modem(s), switch, go through a wizard and voila, done.
"[...]And before you say it, there is NO security benefit over a properly configured stateful firewall."
I can't tell if I'm just becoming a cranky old man prematurely, or am just tired in general of the overall cultural trend of trying (and succeeding a distressing proportion of the time) to get the public peeing itself with fear over everything, but wussy, feeble, namby-pamby "OMG THE INTERNET! IT CAN SEE MY COMPUTER! QUICK! COWER BEHIND THE NAT WHERE WE'LL BE SAFE!" crap lately just irritates the hell out of me.
Every major modern operating system seems to come with a built-in firewall now (usually configured in an overly-restrictive, better-safe-than-sorry mode, which is probably appropriate for "consumers" but annoys me personally) already, and I rarely if ever seem to hear about security problems affecting end-user computers that can be initiated from outside the user's box (i.e. by initiating an unsolicited connection from outside) any more. Most of the security problems these days seem to be users downloading things semi-intentionally (e.g. malware), which the NAT does absolutely nothing about.
I may be too cocky, but typical firewalls don't even seem to be that useful any more for "consumer" machines that don't normally run server processes. Unless I am mistaken, most of the time the only useful function a firewall has for a "consumer" machine is as a digital diaper for network-incontinent processes (i.e. malware again, sending spam or otherwise making OUTGOING connections for nefarious purposes - again not blocked by NAT).
With IPv6, we finally have a shot at getting out of the state where nearly everyone's "virtually social" interaction on the internet is done standing behind a locked door, peaking through a keyhole and trying to make exchanges with visitors through the mail slot while wearing an Aluminum Foil Deflector Beanie to keep the mind-control packets out. I don't really mind so much any more if other people like living the virtual portion of their lives that way, but I'm completely sick of being expected to do so myself.
(I feel like I should insert a rambling story about how in my day we had to connect via SLIP or a dial-up shell account and we didn't have none of these newfangled firewalls getting in our way, ended with a "GET OFF OF MY LAWN, DANG KIDS!". But I will restrain myself.)
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This was before they released the 'L' version. I owned a WRT54G for 1 day. I had heard what great routers they were, and decided to try one. Unknown to me, Linksys had totally redone it just before I got mine. I got revision 5, which was, I think, VXWorks based with half the RAM, when what I thought I was getting was Linux based, which was revision 4. Nothing on the packaging indicated this vital difference.
That revision 5 WRT54G was garbage. Couldn't so much as ping Google reliably. If a ping came back at all, it was after a 10 second delay. Switched back to my ancient Netgear RP114, and everything worked again. And that WRT54G went back to the store for a full refund.
My current router is a Netgear WRN3500L -- has the all important 'L' on the end, which I hope means its reliability is acceptable. Needed another in a hurry when my rather crappy SMB Barricade 7400 died. Made a list of brands and models I felt were acceptable, and that was the only one on my list that I found locally. And I can flash it with OpenWRT or DD-WRT if I wish. Won't help if the hardware doesn't hold up, of course, but so far it's been mostly good. Just one game client is no longer able to communicate, and I can't see how the router could be queering that. Even sniffed the packets, and didn't see any obvious problem. But the client worked fine with the old router. Perhaps there was a change on the server side coincidentally about the same time as I got that new router?
I am amazed at how awful most of these commodity routers are. Very hard to find one that isn't crap. Linksys changing everything under the hood like that is just par for the course.
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