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Recently purchased the Netgear RAX120 moving from a Netcomm NF18ACV. In comparison the wifi performance and range on the RAX120 is phenominal, however the IPv6 support is quite poor.
The only real option is setting the IPv6 on or off and the method of obtaining the the leases/subnets(static, DHCP, PPP, etc...). While I understand this is a home product, this just isn't enough to call the device supporting IPv6 and looks to be minimal investment. For such an expensive device I was hoping to use it for wifi and a WAN router. However this functionality missing means I will likely just put the RAX120 into AP mode and get a seperate WAN router device to handle WAN/LAN DHCP, firewalling and routing.
This is what is missing.
1. FIREWALL - There is no IPv6 firewall configuration. You can have it on or off, but you can't provide any rules. This is a big step back from IPv4 in which port forwarding essentially allowed you to punch holes in the firewall and allow certain traffic you want inbound. With IPv6 obviouly port forwarding isn't required as you get more then one public IP. But the concept of allowing inbound traffic you want is an all or nothing deal which is terrible! Allow users to configure the firewall rules.
2. SUBNETTING/VLAN - The above leads to my next point. If your allowing inbound traffic you often do it to certain devices only. For IPv6 you only support a /64 it seems. However the router has no way to provision seperate IPv6 subnets(so that traffic could be paritioned with different rules per subnet). A number of ISPs provide customers a bigger allocation like a /56 for example, This is recommended for ISPs and considered fairly standard/common. The device regardless of getting the /56 from the ISP handles this by reducing it to a /64 (single subnet), but then the problem becomes where can you put static hosts if the router is reducing to a single subnet of /64 and enabling DHCP within it. Ideally what I think should happen is the router setup all /64 gateway addresses in the /56(supernet) but only configure the DHCP server as the first /64 subnet. This would allow the other subnets to be used for static assignment as the gateway addresses in each subnet are configured still. A step further would be having VLANs configurable and assigned for some of these gateways(instead of operating them all on the same VLAN).
3. IPv6 static DHCP leases - This is an alternative to '2.' I guess and probably easier for Netgear to do but a little less robust. Allow us to enter IPv6 DHCP static leases similar to IPv4. By doing this people could tie MAC addresses to specific IPv6 IP and then be confident the IPv6 address of devices won;t change so they could configure the IPv6 firewall inbound rules against these static addresses.
1 Comment
IPv6 DHCP could also be substituted with Stateless Auto Configuration in many networks as not all devices support DHCPv6.
Being able to configure local prefix IPv6 networks for fields like DNS servers would also be a big win. This feature used to exist but has since been deprecated and only support for global unicast addresses are now supported.