Airport Extreme 7.3.1 disables IPv6 tunnel

[lethe]

I recently upgraded my Airport Extreme's firmware to theee latest version, 7.3.1.  I didn't notice until a few days later that my IPv6 tunnel from HE wasn't working, and didn't right away make the connection with the firmware upgrade (duh).  After spending few hours deleting/rebuilding tunnels, rebooting routers and machines, switching from manual to autoconfig, I discovered that it's a known issue: firmware 7.3.1 has a regression that breaks IPv6 tunnels.

Woodyatt is the Apple engineer for IPv6 and Airport networking, so he'd know.  Hope they fix it soon.  :-(

[lethe]

I recently upgraded my Airport Extreme's firmware to theee latest version, 7.3.1.  I didn't notice until a few days later that my IPv6 tunnel from HE wasn't working, and didn't right away make the connection with the firmware upgrade (duh).  After spending few hours deleting/rebuilding tunnels, rebooting routers and machines, switching from manual to autoconfig, I discovered that it's a known issue: firmware 7.3.1 has a regression that breaks IPv6 tunnels.

Woodyatt is the Apple engineer for IPv6 and Airport networking, so he'd know.  Hope they fix it soon.  :-(

The new Airport Extreme Base Station that was released on October 20th, 2009 ships with firmware 7.5 which has fixed this issue.  As of this writing, 7.5 firmware has not been made available to older AirPort devices, but presumably that will happen sometime.  So the latest AEBS works with a manual IPv6 tunnel setup with HE, and older AEBSes will soon too.

[jimb]

Why do you guys get airport extremes?  Why not just get a Linksys or D-Link or something.  If u don't like the firmware on a lot of those you can replace it for DDWRT or whatever.  I'm thinking that the AE is also overpriced since it has an Apple on it.  I bet it looks snazzy though.  :P

[lethe]

Why do you guys get airport extremes?  Why not just get a Linksys or D-Link or something.  If u don't like the firmware on a lot of those you can replace it for DDWRT or whatever.  I'm thinking that the AE is also overpriced since it has an Apple on it.  I bet it looks snazzy though.  :P

Does Linksys or D-Link have an IPv6 capable router yet?  I've been waiting for that, but perhaps I've missed it.  Can you link me?

[jimb]

Why do you guys get airport extremes?  Why not just get a Linksys or D-Link or something.  If u don't like the firmware on a lot of those you can replace it for DDWRT or whatever.  I'm thinking that the AE is also overpriced since it has an Apple on it.  I bet it looks snazzy though.  :P

Does Linksys or D-Link have an IPv6 capable router yet?  I've been waiting for that, but perhaps I've missed it.  Can you link me?

D-Link does (DIR-615).  But many consumer grade routers can have their firmware replaced by things such as DD-WRT, OpenWRT, etc, which has IPv6 functionality.

[cholzhauer]

But many consumer grade routers can have their firmware replaced by things such as DD-WRT, OpenWRT, etc, which has IPv6 functionality.

Agreed..but be careful what router you install it on because your router might not have enough space in flash to support IPv6 ;)

[lethe]

Why do you guys get airport extremes?  Why not just get a Linksys or D-Link or something.  If u don't like the firmware on a lot of those you can replace it for DDWRT or whatever.  I'm thinking that the AE is also overpriced since it has an Apple on it.  I bet it looks snazzy though.  :P

Does Linksys or D-Link have an IPv6 capable router yet?  I've been waiting for that, but perhaps I've missed it.  Can you link me?

D-Link does (DIR-615).  But many consumer grade routers can have their firmware replaced by things such as DD-WRT, OpenWRT, etc, which has IPv6 functionality.

OK, thanks for the information.  Honestly, when I was buying my router back in 2007, I searched far and wide for any IPv6 capable routers from any brands (Apple, Linksys, D-Link, Netgear, Belkin).  Except for Apple's Airport Extreme, I could find none.  Well, there were also the Cisco SOHO series routers.  It was a choice between a $170 router that was easy to use, had gigabit ethernet, a USB print server, draft 802.11n, and a $350 router that would require IOS command line configuration, and had none of the above home user features.  And, as you point out, I could have bought a generic Linksys and flashed it with a custom linux firmware.

Of the three choices, first I did try the OpenWRT firmware on my Linksys router.  I couldn't get all the features to work.  And it disappeared and had to be re-flashed every time the power went out.  And it didn't support all the features I wanted.  I'll bet things with those customer firmwares are a lot better today in 2010 than they were in 2007.  I would be interested in trying again.

As for the Cisco IOS router, I did consider that option.  I thought it would be cool to be able to get hands on experience with my own Cisco IOS router.  Maybe something cool I could put on my resume.  Or at least just a neat gizmo factor.  But the lack of features combined with the super-high price tag stopped me.

Which left me with the Apple router.  It hit a sweet spot.  It had the best hardware (in 2007 there were very few GigE 802.11n routers with shared disk/shared printer.  perhaps the AEBS was the only one), and the best software (in 2007, it was the only router that had IPv6).  

And when Mac OS X 10.5 came out, with this router it was possible to enable Back To My Mac (which is, interestingly, built on top of some IPv6 tunneling technology), which I find to be a totally awesome feature.  Now I can't live without it.  You can emulate the ability to connect to to your home network from anywhere on the IPv4 internet through clever use of NAT portmapping and DNS updating, but it's an ugly hack, and still not as usable as BTMM.  

As for being expensive due to being an Apple product, I'll point out that today, the Apple router is more expensive that the top of the line D-Link (which is not a dual band router), but less expensive than the top of the line Netgear (which is a dual band, and seems to match the AEBS feature for feature).  So the AEBS is actually the cheap model, for the hardware it provides.  As with most Apple products, the issue is not that they're expensive.  But rather that they just don't offer cheap options.  A top of the line Dell laptop costs the same as a similarly specced Apple MacBook Pro.  But from Dell you can buy many cheaper options.  From Apple you can only buy the one model.

Things haven't been all roses with my Apple AEBS though.  The main feature I bought it for, IPv6, stopped working partially not long after I bought it (which is of course the reason for this thread).  I could not use my HE IPv6 tunnel with the AEBS for, what was it, like 3 years!  Man, was I pissed about that.  I could still get on IPv6, using the dynamic tunneling.  But it was spotty.  And it broke my DNS.  I downgraded my firmware for a while, and was able to get back on.  And finally, when I heard that 7.5 was out, but only for the newest routers, I went out and bought a new router.  I'm still pissed about that too.  This firmware needs to be pushed out to all AEBS very soon!

Finally, let me add that I see the D-Link 615 mentions an "IPv6 Gold" certification under its specs, none of the other D-Links I looked at seem to have it.  So while it's encouraging that D-Link offers one model with IPv6, it's unacceptable that I have to choose between IPv6 and 802.11n/GigE connectivity/dual band antennae.  Can't D-Link normalize their software across their product line?  Or do they offer IPv6 across the line, but just not mention it on the site?  And I can find nothing at all on the Netgear site about IPv6.  I'm assuming they don't support it.  All the OS vendors (let's list them: MS, Apple, linux, BSD, Solaris) have been supporting IPv6 since roughly 2001.  Why is it taking the home networking vendors so long to get on board?  The transition is coming next year!  And they're still selling these routers!  Yeah, sure, we could all install custom non-vendor supported firmwares on our routers.  But how realistic is that?

[jimb]

I go the cheapest, but perhaps not simplest route by re-purposing old PCs to be routers.  For instance, my IPv6 router is an old PIII 500mhz laptop with a couple of old PC-card enet interfaces plugged into it running linux and iptables/ip6tables.  Works great.  And is free.  For switches, I use switches (right now it's a little linksys 10/100 16 port jobby).

Having said that, there are firewall distros like m0n0wall and pfsense and other stuff that's probably only slightly more difficult to set up than consumer grade hardware routers.

The one disadvantage is that laptops, and especially desktop PCs are obviously larger and use use more power than a consumer grade router.  Although laptops aren't so bad.  Plus they have a built in "UPS."  :P

[lethe]

I go the cheapest, but perhaps not simplest route by re-purposing old PCs to be routers.  For instance, my IPv6 router is an old PIII 500mhz laptop with a couple of old PC-card enet interfaces plugged into it running linux and iptables/ip6tables.  Works great.  And is free.  For switches, I use switches (right now it's a little linksys 10/100 16 port jobby).

Having said that, there are firewall distros like m0n0wall and pfsense and other stuff that's probably only slightly more difficult to set up than consumer grade hardware routers.

The one disadvantage is that laptops, and especially desktop PCs are obviously larger and use use more power than a consumer grade router.  Although laptops aren't so bad.  Plus they have a built in "UPS."  :P

Maybe now that the new 32nm Intel microarchitecture is out, it soon will be possible to run a general purpose linux distro on some kind of ultra-low power nettop-class x86-64 device including integrated switch and 802.11n antennae in a small form factor.  Throw in a tv card and a blueray drive and a video card with hdmi out, and you've got a device that can sit next to your cable drop behind the tv, be your htpc and your router/wap.

Yeah, that would be pretty awesome. 

[jimb]

Yeh might be possible, although I'm not sure I'd want a single box to do all that stuff anyway.  Kind of of a big single point of failure.

You can also buy little low-power boxes from places like soekris that work well as routers and run things like m0n0wall.