I recently invested in an Airport Express, the new model with WAN and LAN Ethernet. I had started to get to more and more irritated with my Netgear router, so it was time for a change. Since I’m an Apple fanboy the choice wasn’t that hard. The new Airport Express works great with IPv4, but what about IPv6?

When Apple released a new version of their Airport Utility a couple of months ago they did something utterly stupid, they removed all configuration options for IPv6 from their Airport devices. They caused somewhat of a storm on the Internet with irritated and frustrated users. Fortunately they pulled it together and put IPv6 back into the software. Now that we know that IPv6 SHOULD be working on the Airport Express, does it?

Yes, it does! It’s quite easy to configure. I’m using a tunnel from tunnelbroker.net which is free and easy to set up. I have to use a tunnel since my ISP is kind of slow and haven’t implemented IPv6 in their client access networks yet. The configuration is done through a single pane in the configuration utility.

Configuring IPv6 on the Airport

Are there any drawback? As I see it it has a big drawback, you don’t have access to an IPv6 firewall in the router. It either lets all incoming connections pass or blocks all, that’s it. Since I’m using IPv6 for this server and some of my other servers as well this is important to remember. Make sure you have sufficient security on each computer connected via IPv6.

This work, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.