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Netgear Firmware and broken IPv6.

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Why is Netgear ignoring working on it's broken IPv6 after all this time and countless tickets opened by many people your still filtering ICMP/Ipv6 packets doing this causes IPv6 to not function properly and has been the reason for MANY returned Netgear routers. Hey but we have Asus there IPv6 works as intended. :rolleyes:
 
Well you know what netgear does. They focus on hardware rather than firmware. They probably dont have anyone to improve ipv6 with their engineers focusing on improving hardware reliability and quality to make it last longer.
 
Well you know what netgear does. They focus on hardware rather than firmware. They probably dont have anyone to improve ipv6 with their engineers focusing on improving hardware reliability and quality to make it last longer.

Whats the point in improving hardware if the firmware that drives it is broke. Look this is a very simple fix that people have been asking for quite some time. Simply change the IPv6 firewall rule to allow ICMP/IPv6 packets to pass through the way IPv6 was intended to work. For me i have taken care of the problem got rid of the Netgear and purchased the Asus RT-AC68U problem solved but others would sure like some answers on this and the reason i posted this thread.
 
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Whats the point in improving hardware if the firmware that drives it is broke. Look this is a very simple fix that people have been asking for for quite some time. Simply change the IPv6 firewall rule to allow ICMP/IPv6 packets to pass through the way IPv6 was intended to work. For me i have taken care of the problem got rid of the Netgear and purchased the Asus RT-AC68U problem solved but others would sure like some answers on this and the reason i posted this thread.

IPv6 works properly on the R7000 with either tomato ARM firmware or DD-WRT firmware. Both do the right thing with ICMPv6 packets. Personally, I don't see any difference between using RMerlin firmware on my RT-AC68P and using tomato or dd-wrt on the R7000. I wouldn't use Asus firmware on the RT-AC68P, either *smile*.

For those that haven't, give tomato ARM a try...Shibby's v131 has been working very well for me. There's also a more modern web admin GUI for it, if you're into that, "Advanced Tomato", that works well. DD-WRT seems to be in not such a great place at the moment, have not fixed one particular persistent problem which ruins it for me (for the moment).
 
Totally understand what your saying Roger but this is a stock Netgear firmware issue that should have been fixed some time ago. As always kudos to third party firmware but that dont mean stock firmware should be limited and not function properly.
 
Why is Netgear ignoring working on it's broken IPv6 after all this time and countless tickets opened by many people your still filtering ICMP/Ipv6 packets doing this causes IPv6 to not function properly and has been the reason for MANY returned Netgear routers. Hey but we have Asus there IPv6 works as intended. :rolleyes:

Filtering ICMP6 packets is not a bad thing, and for many Netgear consumer devices, this is a prudent approach. Should still be able to support DHCP6 inside the LAN, and one still has link-local addressing.

I'm curious as to specifics of what you are suggesting is broken with Netgear's implementation - but also consider reading up on the following IETF RFC...

https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc4890.txt

And how does Netgear break this?
 
If I may ask. Why do I want to use IPv6 inside my network? I just can't see the need for it. Thanks
 
I'm curious as to specifics of what you are suggesting is broken with Netgear's implementation - but also consider reading up on the following IETF RFC...

See 4 .3.1 and 4.4.1 of this RFC. Those ICMP packets should not be dropped. I don't know if they're the reason for Netgear's connectivity issues however. IPv6 support is a disaster, with ISPs each having their own bastardized interpretation of the numerous RFCs involved.
 
If I may ask. Why do I want to use IPv6 inside my network? I just can't see the need for it. Thanks
IPV6 addressing has so much address space that you can be given a public address instead. For example you could be given an ipv6 block with a thousand addresses and you wont need to use NAT or UPNP anymore. This means that when moving to gigabit internet you wont need a router fast enough to do NAT at those speeds since even a MIPS CPU can route at those speeds. So instead of being given a single public IP address like what you currently get with ipv6 you can be assigned a whole address space instead.

It also has better support of protocols like multicast which is used for discovery and applications like live TV which means less bandwidth is needed overall to use them. If you had 2 devices behind your router watching the same live TV stream the data is only sent once and when it reaches your router it gets distributed to both devices.

If you have a very good network you will benefit from ipv6. If your ISP has a lossless network with fibre optics and no modems or PPP to worry about than it will benefit from ipv6 too. If you are using a network for very basic uses you can still use IPv4 or the old IPX
 
That was a very good explanation. What I don't really like is that IPv6 has a real mac address in it. I have a 10-15 devices and I don't have Gigabit line. For testing I switched my router into IPv6 mode and I didn't see any improvements that I would benefit at this time. I guess the time will tell. I don't if I should try to set it IPv6 to IPv4 mode.
 
You dont need a gigabit line for testing even though ipv6 has larger headers. If your internet goes through ethernet, fibre optics and the like than you wont be expecting packet losses. If it does not use PPP or even some modem that adds to the overhead than the network will not have issues when implementing ipv6.
networks may implement ipv6 differently so it really depends on your ISP as well. But with ipv6 you wont need to use NAT anymore because there are more than enough addresses for all devices in the world.
 
That was a very good explanation. What I don't really like is that IPv6 has a real mac address in it. I have a 10-15 devices and I don't have Gigabit line. For testing I switched my router into IPv6 mode and I didn't see any improvements that I would benefit at this time. I guess the time will tell. I don't if I should try to set it IPv6 to IPv4 mode.

I believe that most people using IPv6 are using dual-stack IPv4/IPv6, since most sites on the internet currently have IPv4 addresses. There are a few sites with IPv6 IP addresses, like gmail, facebook, and yahoo, and others, but they still have IPv4 address as well. The Chrome browser, and other browsers as well will use IPv6 in preference to IPv4 connections if they are available, so you can use a browser extension and see what sites that you are connecting to that support IPv6.

None the less, IPv6 didn't come along as a performance improvement initially, it was simply designed to provide all the IP addresses that we would need for the foreseeable future. There is a limited quantity of IPv4 addresses left unallocated, and at some point they will be exhausted. Of course, any performance improvements that IPv6 might bring would be welcome, but that wasn't the driving force behind IPv6. In fact, if you run side-by-side download speed tests with IPv4 and IPv6, IPv6 is currently usually a touch slower. Not much, just a matter of 1 or 2%.
 
Totally understand what your saying Roger but this is a stock Netgear firmware issue that should have been fixed some time ago. As always kudos to third party firmware but that dont mean stock firmware should be limited and not function properly.

I agree with you. However, I've pretty much given up on stock firmware for daily use as it gets more and more dumbed down, closed, and less useful to me. I use it pretty much only for reference, but I realize that a lot of people do use it as a matter of course. And yes, it should work, but when it doesn't, one can use the well-supported third-party firmware alternatives. I worked with Netgear support on IPv6 support on Comcast for several months, along with many other users, before they got it to work properly and consistently, and they never did get the ICMPv6 stuff working to my expectations. Tried lots of tech test versions of Netgear firmware to help out before they got to where they are now.

However, I'm not making excuses for that kind of inability to get advertised features working, but I understand that IPv6 wasn't core functionality at the time, and Netgear was having lots of problems at that time. Luckily DD-WRT was there, and in pretty good shape, kudos to Kong on that one. Netgear isn't the only OEM that has problems with firmware, Asus fixes bugs and introduces more in the process (thank goodness for RMerlin), and Linksys under-features their routers, as well as introducing new bugs as they fix old ones. I remember back in programming school that "how many new bugs are introduced in the process of fixing existing bugs" was considered one measure of software quality and modularity. That being the case, these OEM firmware developers aren't doing very well with their released firmware *smile*. They really need to work on the quality of their releases. And the primary focus of that is good design principles, as well as spending time testing, including thorough regression testing.
 
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OEM firmware developers aren't doing very well with their released firmware *smile*. They really need to work on the quality of their releases. And the primary focus of that is good design principles, as well as spending time testing, including thorough regression testing.

Amen to that.. ;)
 
It would be nice to have options with IPV6, now that more ISP's are deploying it - some OEM's are taking a very conservative approach, reasonably so, but this is not Netgear specific...

And I think this also has to do with the ISP's, as some have taken a direct approach, vs. a couple of dual-stack approaches, so for the OEM's, it's a bit of a challenge.
 
If anyone on the post has any specific NETGEAR product and IPv6 ongoing issues, please let me know.

We can help arrange support/engineering to help resolve.
 
If anyone on the post has any specific NETGEAR product and IPv6 ongoing issues, please let me know.

We can help arrange support/engineering to help resolve.

You are saying the same thing again with the latest firmware!

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