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IPv6 and Stateless Configuration

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kibosh

Regular Contributor
Hi all and specifically @RMerlin ,

I was hoping you may be able to help . . . Rogers in Canada recently began offering Comcast's Xfinity IPTV service (they call it Ignite TV) and I recently had it installed. It came with the Arris XB6 modem which I would like to bridge and obviously retain fully functioning TV.

I went ahead and bridged the XB6 and then tried to setup IPv6 on my RT-AC3100 (currently running the latest official firmware) but for the life of me can't get it working.

If I select Native, DHCP-PD enable (the prefix is not the same on the ASUS as the prefix displayed on the XB6 modem which I thought was odd as I thought the point was getting the prefix automatically from the modem), stateless enable, all of my clients get an IPv6 address but I do not get live TV on the Xi6-A receivers. Everything else on the receivers works like the guide, PVR, and apps.

If I set it to DHCP-PD disable and enter the IPv6 prefix given by the XB6 and set it to Stateless I get Live TV but the apps don't work.

When I check the configuration on the XB6 itself they have appeared to set it up as Stateful rather than stateless and so I figure this is the missing part but if I set the Asus to Stateful and use the same range found in the XB6 then the router does not appear to hand out any IPv6 addresses to ANY clients at all. In fact, in the IPv6 log the addresses start popping up for the different clients but they are definitely incomplete (they are missing half of the address and end prematurely).

I was searching the forums here and only noticed one other person complaining that Stateful IPv6 appears to be broken ever since Asus brought out 384 firmware (thanks @Datalink).

Is there any chance this behaviour has been corrected in the Merlin firmware or is this something Asus would need to fix? Or maybe I am just doing something wrong altogether?

Any insight is appreciated!

Kibosh
 
Well I think I figured it out! Unfortunately I don't know much about IPv6 so that explains a lot ;)

I went back and bridged my modem to take another stab at this. I set the IPv6 to Native, DHCP-PD enable, and changed the auto configuration setting to Stateful. I set the IP Pool starting address to 0001 and the ending to fffe just like my XB6 has. I clicked on apply and let it come back up. All of the address auto populated. I then pulled the power on the router for 30 seconds and then fired it back up.

Tried my TV and clients and they all work! I didn't realize that 0's can be suppressed with 2 colons when displaying an IPv6 address. In the System Log/IPv6 tab the addresses are displayed like this: aaae:aaae:aaae:aaae::a4c1 (I changed the real address to aaae) and I was used to seeing something like: aaae:aaae:aaae:aaae:aaae:aaae:aaae:a4c1. So the addresses I was looking at appeared to be incomplete but they are actually aaae:aaae:aaae:aaae:0000:0000:0000:a4c1. Even my iPhone displays its IPv6 with this notation. I think the crucial step I was missing was not fully shutting down the router which I think is recommended when changing these IPv6 settings.

So it seems the official firmware hands out IPv6 stateful addresses just fine and I am sure merlin's does too. I hope this helps others but probably not since Stateful seems like a fairly rare implementation.

One thing I am still confused by is the IPv6 prefix delegation in the XB6 modem is different from the IPv6 prefix in the Asus router. The first 3 groups of 4 are the same but the 4th group is different. I had assumed since its called "delegation" the prefix would be the same?
 

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