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Comment by ghshephard | Hacker News Reader

I just purchased a new Comcast internet connection two weeks ago, leased their default router, have a vanilla MacBook Air.

I'm happy to report that I was required to do precisely and absolutely nothing - beyond spending a few minutes unpacking the (largish) cardboard box they shipped me, plugging in a coax cable to the router, ethernet cable to my USB dongle, and then activating my account.

15 Minutes later I was online. I've got 2001:558:6045:ba:24b2:f727:e418:328f/128, and I haven't found an IPv6 network/host that I can't route to natively, though I'm sure they are out there.

Zero effort and, if I wasn't paying close attention, it wouldn't be clear to me which services are communicating to me over IPv6 verus IPv4.

It Just Works.

Looking forward to World IPv6 Launch day on 6/6.

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I'm in almost the exact same position, except that I didn't know I had v6 access until I happened to think of the IPv6 launch sometime last week, wondered if I was online with it yet, and tried it by enabling it on the AirPort base station. It works perfectly: no glitches, as fast as v4, gets v4, v4/v6, and v6 sites perfectly. It does, as you say, just work.

Props to Comcast for putting the future of the internet into their customers' hands.

> Looking forward to World IPv6 Launch day on 6/6.

It's already here! W6L occurred at midnight UTC, which was prior to your post.

Does that IPv6 address change? I know Comcast changes your IPv4 address periodically unless you pay for a static one.

Amusingly even if the Comcast LAN prefix is static most operating systems by default will cycle your address anyways. In IPv6 a dynamic address is now a Feature!

Whether or not the Comcast LAN prefix changes is a good question though. I've seen no evidence that they plan to deliberately change them. My Comcast IPv4 address stays static pretty much until I reset my modem and even then it often grabs the same v4 address again.

I did a bit of really basic testing earlier today and no amount of modem resetting seems to cycle the IPv6 prefix I am getting delegated.

In the end though, dynamic DNS does a very good job of dealing with the occasionally changing prefix and IPv6 gets rid of the need to do port forwarding so maintaining dns records with public addresses to machines on your home network is actually possible now. I am happy to report that (with the proper firewalls in place) it is downright awesome to have IPv6 at home and at work and on your phone. I can't wait to see what sort of new home cloud tech this will enable.

Well if Comcast only assigns you a /128 then you're kinda stuck :) Good to know, thank you.

comcast assigns a /64 if you plug in a router that supports DHCPv6. You get a /128 if you plug your macbook air straight into the modem. =)

I will have to experiment with this. I can't get a Comcast rep to explain how a static IPv4 address (which doesn't use DHCP) plays with IPv6 access :)

On the topic of Comcast's ipv6 capabilities, does anyone know if DD-WRT will work with getting native ipv6?

Yes, it is capable of doing Native IPv6. However, pay attention to it: the version I grabbed a few months ago did not come with ip6tables or their corresponding kernel modules. You do not want your printer visible to the whole internet.

Yeah, I played around with it some more last night and apparently Comcast uses DHCPv6 the dd-wrt build I'm running (v24 SP2, whichever build is recommended for the Linksys E2000) only has Radvd. In addition, my modem (SB5101) only has IPV4 so oh well. I'll just have to wait.

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