SixXS IPv6, Speedtouch 5×6 and Airport Extreme Base Station
So yesterday I decided it was time to make my homenetwork IPv6 enabled. Shouldn’t be too hard, since it’s a full MacOSX network, including the Airport Extreme Base Station (AXBS) that we use for connection. I requested a tunnel at SixXS, got it within 15 minutes and configured my AXBS to make the tunnel. That’s wasn’t really hard, only I forgot to request a subnet too, which made it IPv6 kinda stop at the AXBS. Also, since the AXBS doesn’t have any sort of status check, I was unsure if the tunnel was created correctly. Especially since the SixXS panel said it couldn’t ping me and I couldn’t ping myself from another IPv6 enabled server…
Some querying pointed towards the Speedtouch (which was actually quite obvious, in retrospect). I needed to put my AXBS in the DMZ behind the modem. Sure, no problem there. Let’s just select “Assign the public IP address of a connection to a device” in the interface and select the AXB… Ow, apparantly, the Speedtouch only wants to assign the public IP address to a device that gets it’s IP address from the Speedtouch’s DHCP server. No problem, let’s make the AXBS get it’s IP address through DHCP instead of stati… Ow, apparantly, the AXBS requires a static IP address to do tunneling… Now what?
As is usual with the Speedtouches, under the hood they have far more capabilities than advertised through their webinterface. However, searching through the CLI manual, it’s not very obvious how to add a device to the DMZ. So let’s take the lazy guy approach:
First, I made sure all the Speedtouch was in working order and made a backup of the configuration. Second, I added a device to the DMZ and made another backup. Thirdly, I diff’ed both backups and looked at the changes. You’ll notice a line starting with “lease add” that contains the MAC address of the device you just added. Easy-peasy from here on. Simply change the MAC address into the address from the AXBS and upload the new configuration to the Speedtouch.
All of a sudden, it works. And I have an IPv6 enabled home-network. Kinda boring after that, it just all works :S
