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Comment by yjftsjthsd-h | Hacker News Reader

> spends weeks trying to find a router that supports it

? You managed to buy a router in 2024 that doesn't support IPv6?

Yes, and there are different definitions of 'support.' Since IPv6 has many deployment options 'support' might be the most basic, regular definition where the router tries to manage everything and won't work with the network your ISP uses.

Normally IPv6 is added as an afterthought. So it won't support many of the advanced features that the V4 interface does. E.g. its very basic to want to set static IPs -> MAC entries when running DHCP. Of the many routers I've tried that 'support' IPv6 they don't offer these features. V4 will also have features for UPnP and even though most routers are probably using miniupnpd (which has support for IPv6) the chances of it having been setup for the router are slim.

It's quite useful because UPnP can dynamically let traffic reach IPv6 global scope addresses in your network (with pin holing.) So without this feature networked software can't run services easily (arguably what was meant to be a key benefit for v6.) You know -- the funny thing is -- V6 was meant to give everyone 'public', 'routable' addresses. But the reality is because its firewalled (both at the router and the OS) coupled with the availability of services to automatically let traffic through -- I'd say its less reachable than IPv4. Those who hope that V6 is going to be the future of P2P are in for a bad surprise.

I ran pfSense at home, and while I'm sure their IPv6 support was fine enough in a business setting, it was useless in a residential setting. Seems they made some progress[1] in 2021, but that doesn't cover aliases so one could say it's still not fully supporting residential IPv6.

I switched to OpenWRT which has worked well enough.

[1]: https://redmine.pfsense.org/issues/6626

The older Ubiquiti Edge Routers by default don't support IPv6 very well unless you go in by the CLI; you have to set everything up from scratch.

Trying to get it to run from scratch on an OpenWRT x86 image is also a royal PITA, but that might be just a quirk of how the x86 image is configured by default; I haven't had a chance to try it on hardware they support properly.

Related, I just recently got IPv6 in my home connection and tried to set it up with my EdgeRouter X. It was impossible even though I followed all the online instructions to the letter. I then installed OpenWrt on it and it worked like a charm, with IPv6 out of the box (I did customise my configuration later). I wrote a post about the process for anyone interested [0].

[0] https://blog.nytsoi.net/2024/09/19/edgerouter-x-openwrt

Yeah trying to get it to work via config tree is basically begging for pain and suffering. You need to create all the configurations from scratch via the CLI to have a chance for it to work in a semi sane way.

I was able to finally get it work on one of my subnets, but then everything sort of just fell apart because I have a segregated network aside from my main home network and for the life of me I couldn't get it to work on two different subnets. Then throw in the whole issue of firewall rules, since since the prefix my ISP assigns is dynamic; it changes every time the router reboots. I figured I'd have to write a little service to watch the prefixes and adjust the rules as needed but just seems too like too much grief to deal with.

Left it until now when I found that android does some weird shenanigans with DNS so it's back on my radar but it's not something I'm particularly looking forward to struggling with again.

I actually had the same deal with firewalls and prefixes, since I want to direct traffic to my server and its address obviously depends on the prefix. Turns out OpenWrt has a feature for this too [0], meaning you can use a destination address like "::1234/-56" in your firewall rules.

[0] https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-user/firewall/fw3_configurati...

You'd be surprised how many cheap tenda wifi "access points" sold right now for 15€ still don't support v6, even though access points shouldn't mess with anything above L2.

Well, you still need a way to manage them. Having an administrative web interface accessible over IPv4 but not IPv6 was probably considered Good Enough by whoever wrote the firmware.

Same reason cable modems don't mess with anything above L2 but are still reachable at http://192.168.100.1/ (no IPv6 equivalent).

> Same reason cable modems don't mess with anything above L2 but are still reachable at http://192.168.100.1/ (no IPv6 equivalent).

Isn't that what fe80::/10 is for? (Or ff02::1 but I grant that's harder to use)

That's a link-local address range (like 169.254/16 in IPv4). You'd need to specify which local link to use in order to connect to it (e.g. http://[fe80::aa:bb:cc:dd%eth0]/) and it wouldn't traverse past a router so wouldn't work if you have your own router between you and your modem.

The closest analog would be something in fc00::/8 (which belongs to fc00::/7 which is the IPv6 analog to 10/8, 172.16/12, 192.168/16), but good luck getting cable modem firmware vendors to all agree on which random address to use within that and then actually implement web administration and diagnostics on it. That's what I was getting at by saying there's no IPv6 equivalent; they haven't done that.

> ? You managed to buy a router in 2024 that doesn't support IPv6?

I have a netgear Orbi at home that works just fine, but when I turn on IPv6 it loses internet connectivity after a few hours and takes minutes to reset. Not wanting to be bothered with it, and not having a need for IPv6 I just turned it off. That setup is about a year old.

many of the ones that claim they do, really don't, or just support a subset.

My router does route ipv6 traffic, but does not firewall it, and has other critical security breaches with ipv6.

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