Friday, June 27, 2014

TP-Link 3600 and 6to4 based IPv6

TP-Link 3600 and IPv6


I just bought a TP-Link 3600 router (formal name: TL-WDR3600). Quite a nice router: good Wifi (80/80 Mbps), almost linespeed (router achieves 380/380 Mbps, so not completely reaching my 420/420 Mbps linespeed). Nice configuration features. And all that for only 45 Euro's.

The Dutch product information says it supports 6RD, which ... it does not. So the router can't use Hurricane Electric.
However, it does support IPv6 via DHCPv6, Static IPv6, PPPoEv6 and 6to4.

As my ISP does not support IPv6, I tried 6to4, and ... it works quite well. The results are below

Results


IPv6 Addressing

On the LAN side, the TP-Link 3600 provides SLAAC. The resulting addresses are:

Raspi with Raspbian:
MAC address: b8:27:eb:96:c4:2f
IPv6 address: 2002:3e2d:7722:1:ba27:ebff:fe96:c42f (MAC-based with the u-bit set, aka EUI-64)

Laptop with Ubuntu, with IPv6 privacy extensions activated:
MAC address: 18:f4:6a:9c:ce:d4
IPv6 addresses:
2002:3e2d:7722:1:545f:6a47:e629:cce (privacy extension)
2002:3e2d:7722:1:1af4:6aff:fe9c:ced4 (MAC-based with the u-bit set, aka EUI-64)

So the format of the IPv6 addresses is:
2002:::

In other words, the scheme from http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19683-01/817-0573/iptm-ip6-trans-1/index.html is followed:

This figure shows the format of a 6to4 prefix and shows a prefix example. The following context explains the information in the figure.

IPv6 Speed


A poor man's IPv6 speedtest, ie

wget -6 'http://ftp.belnet.be/ubuntu.com/ubuntu/releases/precise/ubuntu-12.04.4-desktop-i386.iso' -O /dev/null 

results in a mean speed of 7,07 MB/s, so about 70 MBps IPv6.

A "ping6 ipv6.google.com" results in a mean ping time of 6.8 ms

Not bad at all

IPv6 Connectivity


From the public IPv6 Internet, all IPv6 devices are reachable on all their ports. I like it that way. Some people prefer a default-drop behaviour, which I could not find in the router's settings.

Within the LAN, things works as expected: a direct connection between IPv6 enabled devices.

Conclusion


The TP-Link 3600's IPv6 over 6to4 works quite well. I'll leave the feature activated.

Details



Hardware and firmware version

Tests run on WDR3600 v1 with Firmware Version: 3.13.34 Build 130909 Rel.53148n

IPv6 configuration screen