Jan 9
Enabling IPv6 at home with your Airport Extreme for fun (no forseeable profit)
For no particular reason, I wanted to enable IPv6 at home (well, not "no reason" - some of my old research work and the ACme devices that integrate with WattzOn involve IPv6). Only a few quick steps to the future. Plus, best to get ready as we're going to run out of IPv4 addresses in 2011.
(Before you get started, you should know of one huge caveat -- with Firmware version 7.4.2, the Airport Extreme won't maintain an IPv6 tunnel if you are getting an IPv4 address from your ISP using DHCP. To get around this, I took the IP address that it grabbed using DHCP, and then set up my Airport to use that address as a static IP address.)
First, create yourself a tunnel at Hurricane Electric. This sets up a 6to4 tunnel to encapsulate your IPv6 packets inside IPv4 packets; your computers, whenever trying to communicate to an IPv6 host, will stick its IPv6 packets inside an IPv4 packet, send them up to the Hurricane Electric relay router, who will then unwrap the packet and transmit it to the destination. Visa versa for incoming packets. Good: we now have a way to participate on the IPv6 Internet.
Let's configure our home machinery. Fire up Airport Utility, go to Advanced, and then select IPv6. Set the "IPv6 Mode" and "Configure IPv6" to "Tunnel" and "Manually". Then, from your "Tunnel Details" page on tunnelbroker.net, copy the following fields to the Airport Utility page:
- "Server IPv4 address" to the "Remote IPv4 Address";
- "Server IPv6 address" to the "Remote IPv6 Address";
- "Client IPv6 address" to the "Local IPv6 Address"; and
- the "Routed /64" to the "LAN IPv6 Address".
After the router reboots, the tunnel should be up and running. How do you test? Take your computer, and try doing a ping6 -c 4 ipv6.google.com. You should see something like:
raffi$ ping6 -c 4 ipv6.google.com
PING6(56=40+8+8 bytes) 2001:...:3d09 --> 2001:4860:b006::68
16 bytes from 2001:4860:b006::68, icmp_seq=0 hlim=54 time=36.591 ms
16 bytes from 2001:4860:b006::68, icmp_seq=1 hlim=54 time=34.871 ms
16 bytes from 2001:4860:b006::68, icmp_seq=2 hlim=54 time=35.370 ms
16 bytes from 2001:4860:b006::68, icmp_seq=3 hlim=54 time=36.205 ms
--- ipv6.l.google.com ping6 statistics ---
4 packets transmitted, 4 packets received, 0.0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max/std-dev = 34.871/35.759/36.591/0.677 ms
which means you're successfully pinging Google over IPv6!
Remote IPv4 Address
WAN IPv6 Address
IPv6 Default Route
LAN IPv6 Address
I'm not sure where the tunnel settings go in this new GUI...
* Remote IPv4 Address - Server IPv4 address
* WAN IPv6 Address - Client IPv6 address:
* IPv6 Default Route - Server IPv6 address:
* LAN IPv6 Address - Routed /64: