D-Link to support DHCPv6-PD soon

[Ted Mittelstaedt]

nick hatch wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 2, 2010 at 11:19 AM, Ted Mittelstaedt <tedm at ipinc.net> wrote:
> 
>> For example, the D-link DIR-655 firmware proudly proclaims itself
>> "bittorrent certified"
>>
>> What the hell is that?  Who but some gamer gives a fig about that?
>> To me that merely means that the gamer running bittorrent only has
>> to power-cycle his router every day instead of every hour - but he's
>> still not going to blink an eye on having to power-cycle his router
>> at all.
> 
> 
> IIRC, the problem with Bittorrent on the first Linux based routers (Linksys
> WRT54G, for example), was that the timeout for a particular NAT table was
> set too high, and could be exhausted with a high rate of TCP connection
> turnover. DD-WRT et al provided better sane defaults, and gave users access
> to the right knobs to prevent this problem.
> 
> If I were an engineer at D-link observing this situation, I'd be proud of
> fixing the problem in a stock configuration, and might even whisper to the
> marketing department too... Silly, yes. But it makes a bit of sense.
> 
> Why you're conflating Bittorrent traffic with gamers, I don't know.

Probably because since I have never found much use for Bittorrent, I 
don't know who runs it.  (and yes I know all about it's uses for illegal
stuff)

> However,
> having lived with gamers, I can tell you that they most certainly care about
> such things (latency, reliability) more than other users. If my torrent
> traffic impeded a marathon gaming session and caused connections to drop, I
> have no doubt that I'd soon know what an aluminum baseball bat sounds like
> bouncing off a steel computer case.
> 
> ObIPv6 question: Anyone know if other third party firmwares have IPv6 plans
> in the works, eg the Tomato firmware? DD-WRT is great, but for "normal
> users", I find Tomato a great drop in replacement for situations where a
> friend needs a hand, and I never want to touch the equipment ever again.
>

I have run Tomato and it's fine, but it's lack of support for a lot of 
hardware really limits it.  I also think development effort on it has
really died down - from their point, it's "finished"

dd-wrt doesn't "officially" support IPv6.  One of the developers on the
forum has a custom build that he updates from time to time that contains
all of the extra command line IPv6 goodies and that runs in 4MB. 
"Official" support really would require 8MB because the dd-wrt people 
haven't been that interested in releasing a version of dd-wrt without 
all the "turn your AP into a free wireless node with advertising" 
software stuffed into it.

Openwrt is also a roll-your-own with IPv6 support but at least the
base load contains all the tools.  The problem is that none of the
OpenWRT gui's have so far supported it.  With both it, and the modded
dd-wrt load, IPv6 support has to be configured from the command line
of the router.

None of the other 3rd party firmwares out there have any active 
development support and are pretty much restricted to old hardware 
versions of the Linksys WRT54G.

Ted

> -Nick
>