The only practical way to go IPv6 only right now is to use NAT64. This allows you to access IPv4 websites using your computers IPv6 address however it's not trivial to configure, you'll need a proper router(or Linux server), not just whatever router your ISP provides, and said router will still need an IPv4 WAN address but your PC, phone, etc can go IPv6 only and still access legacy sites like GitHub etc. For reference my home network is IPv6 only. I use jool for NAT64
this post was submitted on 22 Jul 2023
7 points (100.0% liked)
IPv6
317 readers
3 users here now
IPv6 Discussions
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
NAT64 and DNS64. Going IPv6-only is not exactly an easy task for people who are not tech-savvy enough...
I did mention not trivial also DNS64 isn't that difficult comparatively. Especially since Google public DNS offers it. Setup the NAT, set your nameservers to 2001:4860:4860::6464 and you're good.
I need to flash OpenWrt on my router?
Most likely, yes. (Are there any off-the-shelf home routers which support NAT64 out of the box??)
You need to be familiar with the command lines too, but that's almost a given since it's OpenWrt that we are talking about. Follow the tutorials here for activating NAT64 on an OpenWrt router.
😵💫 I am confusing...
You can test with one of the free and public nat64 providers.
https://nat64.net/public-providers
Keep in mind some software do not work even with nat64. Steam and discord voice calls forinstance.
Honestly it's not just steam unfortunately. It's also most games in general :/. Some games have working IPv6 support but the overwhelming majority don't. Even non-steam games don't work. Then you have games like terraria where the server fully supports IPv6(this is likely by accident) but the client has no support and so you can only connect to a v6 server using a proxy...games and anything around gaming (discord) is a pain point with IPv6 for sure. At least the only part of discord that breaks are the voice calls as you mentioned ://
Consumer routers, no, enterprise routers...yes
Going IPv6-only with what you use the internet for daily will break things.
For time being the recommended approach is a dual-stack setup with NAT64 + DNS64 in the mix.
NAT64 you'll need Jool on Linux and DNS64 you can just easily use Google or Cloudflare's public DNS64 servers or run your own.
You are ready for IPv6-only. Unfortunately, most of the Internet isn't.
In general, yes, this is possible. However, it is more difficult than just disabling IPv4 on all your devices.
First of all, there are still many (more or less relevant) sites that still are IPv4-only. If you want to reach them via your IPv6-only home network, you need to set up or use services that translate your traffic from IPv4 to IPv6 and vice versa. But this can be error-prone and needs work and understanding of the matter from your side.
The easiest is that you just leave IPv4 and IPv6 enabled in parallel. Your operating system will usually prefer IPv6 over IPv4 if it's available.
Not all software supports IPV6 for whatever reason.
Unfortunately until website owners starts being aware that IPv6 exists, you can only go IPv6-only if you have NAT64. Look at this:
From this screenshot I can see a couple instances (3 Hetzner IPs, one OVH, one DigitalOcean, one AWS and one from AS211772 (they also do have an IPv6 range announced)) that are IPv4-only. All of them could have IPv6 support but they only add the A record on their DNS records and call it a day. It is very annoying to see that.
When the websites "break" what happens exactly? Cannot resolve the dns or something else?
I can access some websites only. Other like github.com Chrome will give me ERR_NAME_NOT_RESOLVED
GitHub is IPv4-only.
view more: next ›