Comcast's IPv6 CPE selection

[Doug Barton]

On 04/24/10 21:23, Ted Mittelstaedt wrote:
> I will chime in on this as I've had a lot of experience with
> this firmware.  For starters there is no "v26" there is only
> V24 and "V24 pre-SP2"

Sorry, I got my Ks and Vs mixed up.  :) (some snipping below)

> The current dd-wrt load is a so-called "beta" of v24 (they call it
> pre-SP2 but the new releases have been called that for almost the last 2
> years) it's SVN# 13064, this came out about 4 months ago.  The
> "official" dd-wrt release does NOT contain good IPv6 support.

13064 is prehistoric. I was using 13575 quite successfully for the last
couple months (as noted in my forum post). I just upgraded to 14289
today since poking around on the web site to prepare my first post on
this thread led to me noticing a more recent stable snapshot.

> Because of this, a user crushedhat decided about 2 years ago to fork
> off SVN# 10070 and made a huge boatload of changes to it to
> support IPv6 properly.  This is detailed here:
> 
> http://www.dd-wrt.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?p=196058#196058
> 
> crushedhat is NOT one of the dd-wrt developers.  He DID post
> a set of instructions on how he setup the build environment.

This is all accurate AFAIK, but it's also no longer necessary. While
having the tools like ping6 and traceroute6 on the router can be handy,
it's not essential.

> The reality of IPv6 on dd-wrt is you either run the developer
> released standard loads (which require 4MB flash minimum)
> and have a lot of things missing from IPv6 (traceroute6, etc.)
> but are the current SVN#, or you run the 2-year-old Crushedhat
> SVN fork which has a complete IPv6 implementation but is not
> the current SVN, or you use the Crushedhat instructions and
> setup a development environment and pull down the current
> SVN source, apply the crushedhat mods, then build that one.

I think I have already demonstrated that there is another alternative.

> The 2 year old crushedhat release is stable and reliable and
> so a lot of people run it.  But it's clear that we are a ways
> off from "official" support of IPv6 from the dd-wrt developers
> for 4MB flash units.  However, in the long run this may not matter
> IF the wireless market jumps en-mass onto the 802.11 N standard.
> That is (IMHO) what the dd-wrt developers are betting on, and it's
> why they are focusing most of their effort on porting DD-WRT as
> quickly as possible to the widest number of N routers that are
> on the market, instead of doing what's needed to get a v24 SP2
> release out the door.

I'm not going to speculate on motives, but I have noticed that there is
less emphasis on making a new official release. This does lead to a
situation where you have to do a little searching on the forums to find
out what is the most recent stable development snapshot, but the two
main producers of them are actually pretty good about doing them on a
semi-regular basis, and the members of the community who follow the
development on a daily basis are pretty good about testing, commenting,
etc. So once again, it's not as easy as even I would like it to be, but
it's not rocket science either.

> And all of this also applies only to the command-line interface
> to dd-wrt.  The GUI interface would have to be modified to support
> all of the IPv6 utilities (like traceroute6) before you could
> point to DD-WRT and call it "grandparent ready" and that is not easy
> as it's written in an obfuscated manner (to prevent copying, the
> GUI is NOT under the GPL like the rest of DD-WRT is)  However, this
> isn't any different than OpenWRT, which while it has a good
> command-line implementation of IPv6, none of the GUIs that
> are out there for OpenWRT support it. (although, those ARE
> easily modified)

Agreed on both points. I used to use openwrt, and it has some things to
recommend it. However (AFAICT) the development has stalled, and they are
definitely NOT focusing on newer hardware which means my latest CPE has
no openwrt version available for it.


hth,

Doug

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