Subj : FidoNews 33:35 [02/08]: General Articles To : All From : FidoNews Robot Date : Mon Aug 29 2016 00:26:30 ================================================================= GENERAL ARTICLES ================================================================= My road to IPv6 and Fidonet Mattias Larsson, 2:203/210 Once upon a time, many years ago I was a proud member of the Fidonet community. I was 2:205/208 if memory serves and I was also running a BBS over the good old phone line with a modem and all. I think I actually started my Fidonet career on a 2400/300 modem which I soon upgraded to some Courier modem and my own phone line (parents didn't like incoming BBS calls :)) Back in the day I ran my BBS and Fidonet on my pride and joy, the Amiga 3000 I'd seem to remember using CrashMail and Raccoon BBS software, but that's a story for a different time. Several times since then I have gotten the urge to check Fidonet and the BBS scene out again. I have tried setting up a few BBS's during the years and a good new times Mystic BBS has been my go to. Fidonet on the other hand was trickier to get into as I had some trouble finding contacts and most of my research ended in my conclusion that "fidonet is dead". Some weeks ago, maybe a couple of months in fact I got this urge to check out Fidonet again and this time I for some reason looked up the nodelist too see if I could find someone there to contact. I have no idea why I didn't consider this on my previous attempts but I managed to find this Felten guy and a working address to a site. Finally I had found a possible way in. With some excellent help from above mentioned contact I managed to get a new node setup, this time using Mystic BBS with it's integrated mailer, tosser and reader (the actual BBS). I quickly hooked up some areas I was interested in and IPv6 has always fascinated me and to my surprise discussions was happening here and there. One such discussion was this list of IPv6 enabled nodes and given my interest in all things computers, programming and Internet I was instantly hooked. I just had to have a IPv6 enabled node too. I'm pretty much green when it comes to IPv6, I have read a bit and given a few spare thoughts to getting myself connected to this new exciting network but I have never really made an effort. The reason I have never given it any serious effort is probably because I didn't know where to start and didn't really see a good reason to do it. To be honest I still don't see much reason except for maybe the good old "because I can". I looked into the software side and found that Mystic BBS was getting IPv6 support via a new Internet Service front so I knew that was an option. I had also looked at binkd or argus as potential solutions in case I needed it. The next step was to see if I could get the actual IPv6 access from somewhere and I knew there were tunnels available but I had no clue how to get one of those or how to configure such a thing. I took a chance and tried to use the IPv6 feature that was built into my current Router, a Netgear Nighthawk R7000. The R7000 sports an IPv6 page where you can choose a bunch of different IPv6 options in a drop-down and one of those was "Auto detect" which sounded perfect for a newbie like myself. It turned out Bahnhof, my ISP had some kind of support and the router set me up with a 6to4 tunnel, completely automatic and with no effort on my part. I made a few posts in IPV6 and helpful Fidonetters quickly concluded that my new IPv6 address was completely unreachable. I looked around in my router and I searched the Internet for answers to why this was not working for me. The router had a IPv6 address and my computer also had one, none of them answered any pings or connects. From what I could scrape together online, which was not't much or very clear was that Netgear has only a very basic support for IPv6 from a hosting perspective. IPv6 works just fine as a simple client or user and it handled both external and internal IPv6 assignments pretty well without to much configuration but it seems it has no options to configure a firewall or let anything IPv6-related through. I posted a question on Netgear's community forum asking for some clarification on what kind of support the R7000 has for incoming traffic and IPv6 firewall settings but I got no response for about a week. I also sent a mail to Bahnhof asking them what kind of IPv6 they could deliver to me, just in case they offer more than the 6to4 tunnel. No answer there either. I had considered a 3rd party firmware to get some better IPv6 support from the router but I had already tried a year or two ago to run a alternative firmware called Tomato by Shibby and unfortunately it made the performance completely tank. I had read about this beforehand and dd-wrt's site for example claims 20-30% drop due to not being able to use hardware acceleration. I was not expecting to drop from 500Mbit down to 250Mbit though, and this was back before I upgraded my Internet to 1Gbit. The R7000 managed to do 980Mbit with firewall and nat which is pretty impressive for a consumer grade router but dropping down to 250-280Mbit on a 1Gbit line is not an option so that way was out. It was at this point I started looking at alternatives to the R7000 and the criteria was pretty much handle IPv6, both incoming and outgoing and keep the performance I have with the R7000. I have a few friends that runs Ubiquity hardware, both routers and WiFi AP's and they come highly recommended both for their quality and flexibility. Said and done, I ordered a Edge Router Lite from Ubiquity and started reading up on their software and how to configure them. The Edge Router is just what the name implies and only have 3 LAN ports and no WiFi I was forced to turn my $200 Netgear router into a simple access point. I did not't mind much since it didn't really cost me anything and the Edge Router doesn't cost all that much anyway. At this point I wandered into completely new and unexplored territory since the Edge Router doesn't have any support for IPv6 in the webui and I was "forced" to do all my IPv6 configuration via the CLI interface. As luck would have it, it seems the people in the router-game makes some really nice CLI interfaces and I have on occasion seen it done at work by the comm-people so I had some grasp on how it worked. Following some guides and information online it became clear that setting up a "real" 6in4 tunnel was no more work than anything else. After a quick search I choose to register a account with Hurricane Electric and from there create a tunnel. Following guides on the Internet I managed to configure the Edge Router with a tunnel and to be completely honest I'm not 100% sure I fully understand how it worked and why. The firewall part of the configuration was much easier and that was soon in place. After this I put my Netgear router in AP-mode and hooked everything up and too my surprise it seemed to work for the most part. And here comes the fun part, I finally got an answer on the Netgear community forum. Two responses actually, one from a Netgear rep who directed me to a 5-line guide on how to activate IPv6 in a stock Netgear router so no useful information there. The other guy asked me if I had enabled CTF in the Tomato by Shibby firmware, you know, the firmware from my earlier trials. I had no idea such a option existed and that it was turned off by default. I guess I only have myself to blame for not trying out Tomato more and finding this option earlier. Anyway, I had a working system now already but it still irked me somewhat that I had a perfectly fine router in the R7000 which was sitting there acting as a simple AP/switch. I just had to try this new revelation out so I went home from work that day, switched some cables around and flashed my R7000 with Tomato again. I made the basic configurations and ran a new speed test to confirm the lack in performance and as before 280Mbit. I jumped into the Advanced -> Misc settings and firmly checked the box labeled CTF (Cut-Through Forwarding), applied the settings and ran a new speed test... 970Mbit!! All of this because I didn't investigate the Tomato firmware enough the first time and assumed the performance drop was the expected one I had read online in the first place. With the performance solved I went into the IPv6 settings of Tomato and since I now have a 6in4 tunnel at Hurricane already I set up up with that instead. This process was stupidly simple from the webui and even the firewall settings for IPv6 was easy to do from the ui. Finally the hardware works as I wanted from the beginning. Now I had to get the software working as it should with IPv6 and for incoming traffic Mystic's new front-end MIS2 does it's job pretty well and I was now able to receive incoming bink, telnet and ssh calls over IPv6 but as for polling nodes it seemed to only use IPv4. I started looking at binkd instead and found the git-repo from where I could get a "fresh" version and install to use for binkp instead. Setting up binkd was a pretty straight forward process and the example config is easy to understand so all I really had to do was configure the addresses and make sure the paths lined up with Mystic's since I still use mystic for tossing. In conclusion, is was a long journey but very interesting and I think I learned a lot from it. This is by no means the end, I feel like I have much more tinkering to do both regarding Fidonet and IPv6. PS. Anyone interested in buying a Edge Router Lite? ;) ----------------------------------------------------------------- --- Azure/NewsPrep 3.0 * Origin: Home of the Fidonews (2:2/2.0) .