zeke
Rising star
Joined 15 years ago
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Re: IPv6 support on Virgin media
"zeke, thanks for the suggestion! It prompted me to learn more about 6to4, which really seems to be a great way of playing with IPv6 behind an IPv4 ISP... and apparently, it's been in actual use for many years. I've found this forum where people were discussing, back in 2003, the traceroutes of the 192.88.99.1 6to4 gateway from their (mostly USA) ISPs" Sounds about right. I have no shame in admitting that I'm late to the party on that front... it's an old standard that I was unaware of. But it stands to reason that most British users would be ignorant... using the tunnelling protocol brings slightly slower ping results and right now, very few sites are IPv6-enabled in any significant way. In the future if you have a connection capable of both IPv4 and IPv6 and you state a preference for IPv6 you _might_ get better speeds assuming everyone else on your local FTTC is using IPv4, but it's not certain. Chances are even if you have native IPv6 from another provider you'll still be using exactly the same network pathways to reach remote servers. The migration to IPv6 is mostly fuelled by dreams, as is the case with many things. With a proper migration, each computer will have a couple of permanent addresses that will ignore usual NAT pathways and allow more seamless connections so wherever you are you can find a specific computer. The security risks of this are obvious, which might explain why takeup has been slow... sure, anyone can find anyone else, but won't you miss the security of a changing IP? Virgin are actually respectible in terms of pooling IPv4 addresses. If you need (or want) a new one, change the MAC of your router. Even basic router software allows this, and it is as simple as changing the MAC via router software and rebooting the modem. We need this ability with IPv6... like any standard that seeks to replace another, it needs to have all the abilities of the previous standard with flawless backward compatibility and more besides. --- "Unfortunately, traceroute doesn't complete (went on to 45 * * * until I killed it). I hope this isn't an indication that 6to4 would fail; after all, ping worked. A ping time of 24ms isn't great, but I suppose it could be worse. I'm guessing/hoping the 6to4 gateway answering to my ping was located at some London exchange, e.g. http://as9153.net It would be sad if it was going via the Americas, China, Japan..." Mine fails on step 10 as well. Never affected the tunnelling, but if you're telnetted into the router and you see this it is easy to think something is wrong. Sadly, as far as I can tell, this is as good as UK IPv6 support gets without paying extra for native support through a company like AAISP. Even with bottlenecking, because Virgin have FTTC in many regions it will often be faster than BT-based ADSL support. It is poor, but those are the facts... when it comes to global broadband takeup, the British are far, far behind.15KViews1like3CommentsRe: IPv6 support on Virgin media
There's an easy way to get IPv6 support on your existing connection without signing up with a tunnelling broker service but it requires either upgrading your router software or getting another router entirely. Of course you could use a computer, but it's inefficient unless you already have a computer you leave on all the time already. I have a Linksys WRT54GS v2.1 splitting my main connection to three PCs and an Xbox, plus a wireless to another PC and any folks who stop by and want to use their laptops. It runs DD-WRT, a third party firmware that is full of options. As my router has 8MB of flash I installed the largest build available. It was fairly easy to enable IPv6 using the scripting functions; you enable Radvd and paste in a script, go to Startup commands and paste in another one then you save the changes and restart the router. If you've done it correctly you have set up a 6to4 tunnelling protocol which assigns your network "ad-hoc" IPv6 addresses which start with 2002 prefix. To test, just go to an IPv6-only site like ipv6.google.com or ping it from the command line. If you use Firefox, you can also install ShowIP which sits at the bottom right of the browser and informs you if a site is IPv4, IPv6 or both. You see, although Virgin don't have native IPv6 support - I'm assuming at this stage because many customers are using old blue NTL modems or the only slightly different black Virgin-branded ones which only support up to EuroDOSCIS 2.0 and they don't want the expense of rolling out an upgrade if the old modem hardware can support it, or a whole new line of modems - they don't block the IPv4 address 192.88.99.1 which acts as a gateway for tunnelling IPv6 sites across the existing IPv4 infrastructure. All it requires is a router capable of handling the tunnelling protocol. Having said all this, every ISP in the UK should be feverishly making their networks IPv6 compliant, not just specialists. It's pretty sickening that Korea has faster internet services than GB, it really is. What we consider "fast" would be considered average or slow by those folks. Also, asymmetrical services are still a joke... good luck if you want to host a small web server or try to connect to your computer from other networks. Trying to use VNC services even with the host computer running 800x600 is painfully slow.15KViews4likes9Comments