TP-Link TD-W8968 - Is it likely to be compatible with Hurricane Electric

[JonesapMasMiette]

I just bought an "IPv6 ready" TD-W8968 domestic ADSL Router/Wifi Access Point  from TP-Link

After updating its firmware to the latest version I see it supports three tunnel protocols, namely:
DS-Lite
6rd
6to4

My understanding from Wikipedia is that DS-Lite and 6rd need the ISP to cooperate and the only one with a chance of working with a third party is 6to4

I *think* - but have not yet found a definitive declaration on the tunnelbroker site - that the supported protocol is 6in4 so I am probably SOL.  Certainly I have not found a way to force the router to sit on address 2 of the allocated network.

Has anyone else tried / succeeded with this model yet?

Thanks in Advance

[kasperd]

My understanding from Wikipedia is that DS-Lite and 6rd need the ISP to cooperate

Usually yes. But it is not strictly required that the provider which you get DS-lite or 6rd service from is your ISP.

DS-lite is a protocol for tunnelling IPv4 over IPv6. I don't think that is what you are looking for, so I won't go into more detail with that.

Your best option then is 6rd. The 6rd configuration parameters can be obtained automatically over DHCP. Doing that is only possible if your ISP gives you the necessary DHCP options, and then they are also deciding which 6rd provider you will use. The intention with 6rd was that the 6rd provider would be your ISP.

I don't know of any public 6rd providers. And I am not even convinced such a service would make much sense. But it is technically possible.

6rd is kind of a cross between 6in4 and 6to4 with so wide configuration options that you can more or less turn it into 6in4 or 6to4 as you wish. All it requires is that you can manually configure the necessary 6rd options on your router instead of having the router get the options over DHCP.

There are users who have previously succeeded in configuring a router with only 6rd support to work with the tunnelbroker.net service. There are a few minor details that won't behave like if your router had real 6in4 support.

The one problem with using 6rd is the assignment of the IPv6 address to the tunnel interface on the router. Usually you cannot configure that with 6rd, so you cannot configure the router to use the address you got from tunnelbroker.net for that purpose. This means connecting from outside to the router itself using IPv6 won't work. There is a risk HE might mistake your tunnel for not being in use due to not responding to ICMPv6 echo request packets on that IP. But I think they have started doing other checks before they delete tunnels.

Additionally you should be aware that if a traceroute is performed from outside to an IPv6 address on your LAN, instead of seeing an IPv6 address of your router, they may actually see the IPv4 address of your router. I have seen that a few times, and at least one of the times it was with a router configured with 6rd.

If you are fine with that, you can go ahead and configure 6rd on your router to talk with tunnelbroker.net. If you post an image of the setup page, we can probably figure out how the fields should be filled in to make it work.

Enabling both 6rd (6in4) and 6to4 at the same time may give you a more reliable connection. But not all routers support it.

[patrakov]

I have bought this router. It is indeed possible to set up a fake 6rd connection and configure radvd so that it works for wired clients. However, this router has a bug that makes IPv6 totally unusable over wi-fi (no matter over 6to4 or over Hurricane Electric tunnel). Namely, when a wireless device broadcasts a duplicate address detection packet, the router resends it (as unicast - and this is the bug) to all associated wireless stations, including the one that sent it. As this is a unicast packet, the original station thinks: oops! my link-local address has a duplicate! and my SLAAC-configured address is a duplicate! no IPv6 for me! >:(

Workaround: disable duplicate address detection on all wireless devices. This is easy in linux, don't know about other OSes.