First steps with OpenWRT

I got tired of waiting for my ISP to provide native IPv6 (shame on you Fibertel), so I decided to install OpenWRT in my inexpensive, relatively outdated home router, a TP-Link WR1043ND, and enable IPv6 through a tunnel. I had an old Sixxs account which I was planning to use, but unfortunately it became inactive and since April this year they neither reactivate accounts nor accept new signups. Tough luck. So the next best option in my list was Hurricane Electric free tunnel (HE from now on).

Following the official instructions to flash OpenWRT was extremely simple. My router's hardware version is 1.8, so I simply downloaded openwrt-15.05.1-ar71xx-generic-tl-wr1043nd-v1-squashfs-factory.bin (latest stable version as of today) and used the stock firmware to flash it. Note: I had to rename the file to something shorter, otherwise the stock firmware wouldn't let me continue (it was pointed out in the instructions). It took a few minutes, and after a reboot I was greeted by OpenWRT's LuCI web GUI. As expected I had immediate Internet access.

Enabling IPv6 was rather simple as well. I signed up for a HE account (it turned out I had one already) and created a new tunnel. Then in LuCI I went to Network/Interfaces/WAN6/Edit and changed the protocol to IPv6-in-IPv4. In order to use this protocol I had to install the corresponding package, which required only a few clicks there. Hint: make sure you update the package list first, otherwise you will get a package-not-found error. Then I entered all the information that HE provided me after creating the tunnel, and after rebooting the router I had IPv6 access.

Windows 10 immediately picked up IPv6. From that moment, browsing to Google, Facebook, Netflix and several other IPv6-enabled websites was automatically done over IPv6.

I was surprised by the speed of my HE tunnel. My home connection is 25/3 mbps (download and upload respectively), and depending on the metering service, the IPv6 speed ranges from 8 to 25 mbps down and 2 to 3 mbps up. Latency from my router to my HE tunnel endpoint (Miami) is around 140 ms, and most pinged servers are 145-200 ms away.