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I have Ubuntu 12.04 installed in a VirtualBox VM on a Windows 8 host computer. Windows 8 had a hosted (wireless) network to which I can connect with my Android phone. The eth0 interface of my VM is connected to the Windows network using a bridged adapter.

Additionally, a wireless 6LoWPAN (low power wireless personal area network over IPv6 using 802.15.4) is connected to the usb0 interface of my VM using a dongle. In this network are several Zigduino nodes. Now, I need to ping from my phone to these sensor nodes.

phone ---802.11--- eth0 Ubuntu usb0 ---802.15.4--- sensor node

The problem is now that I already spent hours on this, but I am still unable to do this. I have given eth0 a static IPv6 address aaaa::xxxx:xxxx:xxxx:xxxx and do router advertisements from this interface with prefix aaaa::/64 using radvd (so my phone also gets an aaaa::xxxx:xxxx:xxxx:xxxx address). The IP address of my dongle and the sensor nodes is also something like aaaa::xxxx:xxxx:xxxx:xxxx. While pinging, I monitored traffic using wireshark. I noticed that eth0 gets router sollicitations from my phone, but these do not reach usb0. It looks like they are not forwarded to the usb0 interface so my VM does not know what to do with these messages and the ping fails.

IPv6 forwarding and all that are already enabled, and I understand that this would suffice from what I read on the internet. Any ideas what I am doing wrong?

Sam
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2 Answers2

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Two comments: you should use ULA addresses instead of aaaa:, but that doesn't matter for your problem.

The reason that your bridge doesn't work is that 6LoWPAN is not compatible with ethernet so you cannot bridge between them. Bridging only copies frames between interfaces, but 6LoWPAN uses a different frame format with different layer-2 (MAC) addresses than ethernet.

A solution would be to use one /64 subnet for your ethernet network and a separate /64 for your 6LoWPAN network. Then you indeed need to enable IPv6 forwarding so that your box will forward packets between the networks. If your box is the default gateway for both networks then it will forward the packets between them. If it isn't then you need to set up some routing so that the other gateways/routers know where to send packets for those networks.

Sander Steffann
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Turns out to be a bug in the Wi-Fi drivers of VirtualBox. Nothing to do about it. I now use an IPv6 router/AP that is connected to my computer via Ethernet.

Sam
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