Cisco EA4500 for home IPv6

Since my previous Asus WL-500gP was broken due to a power outage, it was time for a new one. Some requirements for a new router where; IPv6, 802.11a/n and gigabit Ethernet switch ports. The Asus only had the IPv6 requirement since I installed OpenWrt on it.

The Cisco EA4500 was one that supports all this. Since I quickly needed a new router I bought this one at a local reseller.

I installed this router at home and found out that this router supports native IPv6, but only via auto-configuration and DHCPv6. Manual IPv6 addresses cannot be configured and static IPv6 routing is also not an option.

Since my previous setup was static routing with IPv6, I needed some changes on the Internet Service Provider side. Luckily I do the configuration and administration for this ISP as a day job. So I introduced DHCPv6 as a configuration option for customers.

This is very easy to setup. The router on the ISP site is an Cisco ASR 1002, with an ATM interface to a DSL provider.

First the configuration for static IPv6 routing was as follow (only IPv6 relevant commands):

interface ATMx/x/x.xx point-to-point
 atm route-bridged ipv6
 ipv6 address 2001:xxxx:xxxx:xxxx::x/64
 ipv6 enable
!
ipv6 route 2001:xxxx:xxxx:xxxx::/64 ATMx/x/x.xx 2001:xxxx:xxxx:xxxx::x

Now the configuration with DHCPv6 is (again only IPv6 relevant commands):

interface ATMx/x/x.xx point-to-point
 atm route-bridged ipv6
 ipv6 address 2001:xxxx:xxxx:xxxx::x/64
 ipv6 enable
 ipv6 nd other-config-flag
 ipv6 dhcp server ipv6-dhcp-pool
!
ipv6 dhcp pool ipv6-dhcp-pool
 prefix-delegation 2001:xxxx:xxxx:xxxx::/64 xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
 dns-server 2001:xxxx:xxxx:xxxx:x
 dns-server 2001:xxxx:xxxx:xxxx:x

The EA4500 on the client side does a DHCPv6 request. The ASR on the ISP side replies and sends a prefix for the local LAN side and the DNS servers. The EA4500 advertises the /64 prefix and its own IPv6 address for DNS resolving on the local LAN via router advertisements (RA).

3 thoughts on “Cisco EA4500 for home IPv6”

  1. Thanks for this info! Do you know if this is still the case for the ea4500 where it will only do IPv6 but with an auto configuration vs static?

    1. I don’t have this router anymore, but looking at the latest firmware upgrades since my post, I don’t think they added the static IPv6 configuration in it. The things Cisco is mentioning in their release notes have nothing to do with IPv6:
      – Improved performance with Cloud
      – Fix for Linksys Home Networking Widget
      – Add application feature access without Smart Linksys Wi-Fi account
      – Bug fixes; including UI and Localization improvements
      – Add firmware rollback
      – Improve browser support including IE 10, Firefox 15
      – Additional support for printers using Virtual USB will be included in future releases, as new 3rd party drivers are made available for Windows 8 and Mac 10.8.

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