Ramblings of an aging IT geek
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networking

ipv6 at home, eventually

A short note on finally getting working IPv6 on my home network and the one setting that was quietly breaking it.

Network cables plugged into a switch

I have had IPv6 "working" at home three times now, by which I mean it worked for a week and then quietly stopped and I didn't notice for a month. This time I think it's actually stuck, and the reason it kept breaking was duller than I expected.

My ISP hands out a prefix over DHCPv6 with prefix delegation, and the router was requesting it fine. The problem was downstream: the LAN interface wasn't sending router advertisements often enough, so client addresses expired and weren't renewed, and devices silently fell back to IPv4 without complaining. Everything still worked, which is precisely why it took so long to spot. Nothing breaks loudly when IPv6 fails, it just stops being used.

The fix was making the router actually advertise the delegated prefix properly and shortening the advertisement interval so clients renew before they lapse. Once that was right, ping6 google.com worked from every device, and the test pages all showed a green tick. No NAT, every device with a real global address, which feels faintly radical after years of pretending one public address is enough for a whole house.

Is it worth the bother? Honestly, for a home network, mostly no, the internet works fine over v4. But it's my network and I wanted the green tick, and now I have it. Ask me again in a month whether it's still up.