The network problem described in the previous post did not really go away immediately. As said in that post the problem was from the GPON modem (ONU) itself, I still started to experience problems again the very next day. I wouldn’t think it’s a good idea to turn the modem off and on often and this means I had to observe more to see what is really wrong.
Then on Thursday, August 29, I found that the ISP (Hinet) would only support 8 MAC addresses at the same time in any of their provided circuits. This should be OK for users with just a few IPv4 addresses and use PPPoE. For me I have 6 static IPv4 addresses from the ISP. This normally would be fine as no more than 6 MAC addresses would be seen by the default gateway from the ISP at any given time. The number can go up or down as there might be overlaps. So normally in a situation like this, 8 MAC addresses should be enough for most scenarios. But as I also mentioned in the previous post that I started to use radvd to provide SLAAC capability, this means all of my systems (physical or virtual) can all get at least one global IPV6 address automatically. In a situation like this, the default gateway should see more than 8 MAC addresses constantly.
For this I contacted a Hinet technician and asked about the details of that MAC address limit part and was confirmed on that part. The technician told me before that in my case I could have up to 30 MAC addresses supported and he could see more than 30 MAC addresses on their end. This should be why I would experience the problems earlier. To address this MAC address limitation I had to turn off radvd and restarted those systems that purely use private IPv4 addresses.
IPv6 is definitely going to be more widely used and will be the future. How come the ISP would only limit 8 MAC addresses available at the same time as this should be detrimental to the promotion of IPv6?
