A SECOND LIFE FOR THE LINKSYS PArt 2
                   By Michiel van der Vlist, 2:280/5555


Last week I described how to set up a 6in4 tunnel on the Linksys
WRT54GL. This article describes how to provide IPv6 connectivity
to your machines connected to the LAN.

First you have to enable IPv6 on your systems if it isn't already. Go
to the command line and type "Ipconfig" for Windows or "ifconfig" for
*nix. If you see an address that starts with fe80:: then IPv6 is ena-
bled. That address is a so called link local address.

Windows XP SP2/3 is IPv6 capable, but it is not enabled by default.
From an account with administrator rights type "IPV6 INSTALL" on the
command line to enable it.

IPv6 has a mechanism called "router advertisements". A router announces
itself on the local link by regularly sending out router advertisements
to all nodes on the local link. A node that needs router information
can also send out a router sollicitaion message to have all routers on
the link send out a router advertisement message instead of waiting for
the next broadcast.

The router adverisement contains, among other thing, the subnet prefix
to be used by the nodes on the local link. There is a mechanism called
"prefix delegation" to let a router be assigned a subnet from its
uplink, but this mechanism is not supported by the he.net and sixxs
tunnels and AFAIK, openwrt does not support it either, so the subnet
has to be configured manually. The he.net tunnels come with a /64
subnet by default, sixxs gives you a /48 on request. Note that the
subnet address and the tunnel address are not the same. The tunnel
address also uses a full /64, but that can not be used a a subnet.

Use cut and paste for the addresses if you can. a typo is easily made
you will have a hard time finding the error if it does not work.

Go to the file /etc/config/network and find the following section:

[code]

#### LAN configuration
config interface lan
        option type     bridge
        option ifname   "eth0.0"
        option proto    static
        option ipaddr   192.168.1.1
        option netmask  255.255.255.0
[/code]

Add the following lines:

[code]

# add the subnet prefix to the LAN interface
        option ip6addr  2001:470:1f15:1117::1/64
[code]

Do not ommit the /64, it won't work without it. For the address use the
one that the tunnel broker gave you as the subnet prefix. If you have
a /48 use any /64 within the /48 range.

We also need to tell the firewall to forward packets from the LAN to
the tunnel. Add the following section to /etc/config/firewall

[code]

# Forwarding van lan naar de he.net tunnel

config  forwarding
        option  src     lan
        option  dst     henet
[/code]


That completes the basic setup to have all your machines on the LAN
access the IPv6 internet. They should all get a at least one global
IPv6 address and you should be able to make outgoing IPv6 connections.

Surf to http://www.kame.net. If you see the turtke dance, you have
IPv6. Surf to http://www.test-ipv6.com to see more details about your
IPv6 connection. That site BTW, is run by a former FideNet sysop:
Jason Fesler, the author of GIGO.

Other useful test sites are ipv6-test.com and ipv6-speedtest.net.


This completes the setup for client use. The OpenWrt firewall - as
any decent firewall should - blocks all unsolicited incoming packets
by default. If you wish to run IPv6 capable servers on any of your
systems, you have to open the required ports and enable IPv6 forwar-
ding. I have not experimented with that yet. You can find the infor-
mation on the the official openwrt site, where you can find almost all
of the information on how to play with your new toy. http://openwrt.org

Enjoy.


¸ Michiel van der Vlist, all rights reserved.
Permission to publish in the FIDONEWS file scho and the FIDONEWS
discussion echo as originating from 2:2/2