[Gllug] Need Broadband Modem that supports IPv6

[Richard Jones]

On Tue, Aug 18, 2009 at 04:41:36PM +0100, Alain Williams wrote:
> I changed ISP a few weeks ago as I want to use IPv6.
>
> I was recommended getting something and reflashing with OpenWRT,
> seemed simple enough.
>
> First attempt was a Linksys WRT54GL which is advertised as a
> Broadband router.  I checked OpenWRT - it is well supported, however
> it expects a UTP connection to the Internet - ie it does not have
> it's own built in modem :-( Drat! I thought that I knew what I was
> doing - it seems not.
>
> People on this list seem to have IPv6 -- what do you recommend ?
> Preferably not costing the earth.
>
> I don't care if the modem will do wifi - I just want it to give me a
> UTP connection to the Internet.

I looked into this whole area about 12 months ago and didn't find
anything that was available, reasonably priced and supported wifi.

Since you don't want wifi it might be easier.

Nevertheless it seems like models of consumer routers come and go
faster than mayflies.  What seems to happen is the manufacturer works
out a way to reduce the size of the Linux image in them, and saves a
few pence by shipping a router with even less flash or RAM, making
them, over time, less and less useful as general purpose devices.
4 MB of flash + 16 MB of RAM is not uncommon.

Also it's distinctly non-trivial to recompile these custom distros
like OpenWRT from source.  You usually need a cross-compiler chain
(often binaries) which won't be native packages for your host distro.
So it's not clear to me in what practical sense they give you the real
benefits/freedoms of free software.

I ended up buying a Viglen MPC-L for my VPN/routing needs.  It's a
slow, but fully featured Linux machine and has gigabytes of disk
instead of megabytes of flash, so I can put a real distro on it, RHEL 5
in my case.

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones
Red Hat
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