IPv6 on the Go

by Craig Miller

IPv6 on the go

Here's another example of IPv6 in the palm of your hand.  This time it is a small battery-powered wireless router, smaller than a deck of playing cards. The router has 4G on the WAN, and Wifi on the LAN side.

Wireless Hotspot

While visiting with my cousin recently, he said he needed help upgrading his wireless router. I am always happy to help when I can. He was having all sorts of trouble getting the windows software to work. Being used to not running windows apps (I mostly run Linux), I looked for the upgrade option on the web interface on the router. There is usually lots of room for improvement in web user interface design for embedded devices, and little router was no exception. It took a bit of perusing the menus to find the upgrade option, but once done, the router was upgraded and it was then that I noticed that the little 4G router not only was doing IPv4 NAT (expected), but was also providing IPv6 on the LAN (Wifi) side.

Note the IPv6 Address at the bottom

Verizon won't sell you a Jetpack router, but they will rent/lease it to you, adding about $10 to your monthly service bill.

Looking under the covers

Digging into the router a bit more, the router has a GUA (Global Unique Address) on the LAN side, which would appear that the router is doing DHCPv6-PD on the WAN (rather than running a proxy service and extending the /64 from the Service Provider RFC 7278).

$ ./v6disc
-- INT:wlan0 prefixs: 2600:1003:b458:e277 
-- Detecting hosts on wlan0 link 
-- Discovered hosts for prefix: 2600:1003:b458:e277 on wlan0 
2600:1003:b458:e277:216:8ff:fe00:3        <--- Jetpack           
2600:1003:b458:e277:f203:8cff:fe3f:f041                       
-- Pau 

Probing the Jetpack a bit more, we see that it is listening on telnet & DNS on IPv6, and the web interface is only available on IPv4
$ nmap -6 -sT 2600:1003:b458:e277:216:8ff:fe00:3
Starting Nmap 6.40 ( http://nmap.org ) at 2017-03-25 17:44 EDT
Nmap scan report for 2600:1003:b458:e277:216:8ff:fe00:3
Host is up (0.021s latency).
Not shown: 998 closed ports
PORT   STATE SERVICE
23/tcp open  telnet*
53/tcp open  domain

$ nmap -sT 192.168.1.1
Starting Nmap 6.40 ( http://nmap.org ) at 2017-03-25 17:46 EDT
Nmap scan report for my.jetpack (192.168.1.1)
Host is up (0.012s latency).
Not shown: 997 closed ports
PORT   STATE SERVICE
23/tcp open  telnet
53/tcp open  domain
80/tcp open  http

The Jetpack router is made for Verizon by Franklin Wireless Corporation (based on the MAC address) which has their own product line of mobile hotspots, and runs for hours on the internal battery.

IPv6 Everywhere, even in Hotspots

We have grown used to firing up a hotspot on our phones to give access to laptops, etc when there is no Wifi available. IPv6 is the future internet protocol with less latency (no NAT) and t is great to see that Service Providers like Verizon are also supporting IPv6 connectivity on their portable hotspots.


* Although the telnet port is open, one can not telnet to it, as it immediately disconnects