Ramblings of an aging IT geek
← Ramblings of an aging IT geek
networking

ipv6 at home, eventually

Getting a working IPv6 setup on a home network where the ISP only really cares about IPv4, and the few things that broke along the way.

A bundle of network patch cables plugged into a switch

I've had IPv6 "working" at home roughly four times, by which I mean it worked, then an ISP router firmware update quietly broke it, and I didn't notice for a month because everything falls back to v4 so gracefully you forget the v6 ever existed.

This time I think it'll stick. The ISP hands out a /56 over DHCPv6 prefix delegation, which is generous, and the trick was getting my own router (not theirs) to request the delegation and then actually hand a /64 to each internal VLAN. Once dhcp6c was asking for the prefix and radvd was advertising it, devices started picking up globally routable addresses on their own, which still feels faintly magical after a decade of NAT.

The bits that broke were predictable. Firewalling, mostly. With IPv4 and NAT, the address translation is an accidental firewall: nothing inbound reaches the LAN unless you forward it. With IPv6 every device has a public address, so "accidentally exposed" is a real risk and you have to write the inbound rules you were getting for free. I spent an evening confirming that, no, my NAS was not in fact reachable from the open internet, by actually testing from a phone on mobile data rather than trusting the config.

Worth it? For day-to-day browsing, honestly no, the v4 path is fine. But being able to reach any device at home directly, by a stable address, without a VPN or port-forward dance, is the network the internet was supposed to be. Eventually.