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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? ;)


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