FTTC, IPv6 and other ramblings

[Bill]

Basic assumption behind this post is that BT actually do run fibre to my cabinet in September

I'm pretty sure that my 3Com router won't use one of its Ethernet ports as a WAN port, so I'll need a new router. When I went to the 3Com page to see what else they had I found that they'd been bought by Hewlett Packard back in April, and as I've never found HP to be very Mac-friendly (even the website doesn't work properly!) I decided to look elsewhere.

And whilst I was about it, a bit of future-proofing with IPv6 seemed to make sense.

Obvious possibility is an AirPort Extreme... a bit pricey but a nice piece of kit. Anybody care to give opinions, pros, cons... whatever?

In particular, the spec says  IPv6 (6to4 and manual tunnels), does this mean it can/will work transparently with both v4 and v6 on the WAN?

(Main machines on the LAN will be an iMac and a MacBook, both running Snow Leopard, there's also a few PCs/laptops running various flavours of Windows, Airport Express, AppleTV, two printers and a PS3.)

[Steve]

I am using a AEBS( with Draytek Vigor 120), I like the dual band wifi  and the gigabit lan ports, its stable ,port mappings relative easy to configure, good throughput on wifi. Downside no web interface,no SPI firewall and change of any setting seems to require a reboot.

Don't much about IPv6 and whether it can coexist with IPv4 devices

[Bill]

No web interface and the reboot requirement would be minor niggles, but only a NAT firewall might be a bit more of a concern... thanks, something to think about there.

[pctech]

By the looks of it the airport works out of the box (I'm assuming here that Apple have some Teredo tunnelling servers already set up) but it also allows manual config if necessary so you should be pretty safe.

If you are using XP you'll need to install the IPv6 protocol stack via control panel so that it becomes dual-stack but Vista and 7 are dual-stack by default.

I know nothing of the Mac OS however

[Rik]

Thanks, Mitch.

[pctech]

Np, trying to get to grips with IPv6 and Teredo tunneling myself.

When I've got the tunnelling working in XP I'll put a guide up.

[Rik]

Is it a bit like Colditz?

[pctech]

 

Thankfully Cisco just touches on it in the course but I'm just tinkering to get it working out of interest.

[Rik]

You may have to lead the rest of us out of the wilderness...

[pctech]

Think it'll be a while before you have to be concerned and I suspect that when the time comes most ISPs will supply a preconfigured router if the customer requests more than one IP address but I don't fancy having to enter a 128-bit address onto my xbox using a game controller!

[Bill]

Well, under Network Prefs there's a "Configure IPv6" option which is currently set to "Automatic". and as Macs generally seem to sort themselves out quite well I'll leave it there for the moment.

Though I may well be back 

[Rik]

 

Yes, Arnie.

[Bill]

Think it'll be a while before you have to be concerned and I suspect that when the time comes most ISPs will supply a preconfigured router if the customer requests more than one IP address but I don't fancy having to enter a 128-bit address onto my xbox using a game controller!

The sort of situation I was thinking of is, for example, I get a url in an email and it's an IPv6 site... presumably the DNS servers will return a 128-bit address, what happens then?

[pctech]

The airport will probably resolve it via a Teredo tunnelling server and present it as IPv4

[Rik]

Is that Heathrow or Gatwick?

[Bill]

The airport will probably resolve it via a Teredo tunnelling server and present it as IPv4

Had a quick read about Teredo tunnelling on Wiki... can't say I really understood it¹, but it sounds as though it'll do what I hoped it would, thanks.



¹ My understanding of internet/network comms is at the block diagram level.

With large blocks.

[Rik]

Lego-net? 

[Bill]

That sounds about right

[pctech]

I've put a post up in the computer section about configuring the Teredo client in XP.

[Rik]

Thanks, Mitch.