What's new

Routers with IPv6 WAN IPv4 LAN ????

  • SNBForums Code of Conduct

    SNBForums is a community for everyone, no matter what their level of experience.

    Please be tolerant and patient of others, especially newcomers. We are all here to share and learn!

    The rules are simple: Be patient, be nice, be helpful or be gone!

TS850

New Around Here
I have a real simple newbie question that I do not expect a detailed answer for. All the information I have seen on configuring routers for IPv6 shows both the WAN and LAN sides as using IPv6. Are there routers that will allow you to have a single IPV6 (no IPv4) address on the WAN side and conventional IPv4 private addresses on the LAN side? I suspect I am not seeing anything about such a configuration because there is very good technical reason why that is not possible. If that is the case, I will continue to look for the reason. All I need to know is if that is indeed the case. Thanks
 
I'm not aware of any off the shelf consumer routers that would allow you to do that. I guess if you had something a bit more DIY (like Linux or pfsense maybe) you could setup such a thing. But ultimately it would be fairly pointless for most people because none of the IPv4 LAN clients would be able to reach the internet.
 
Consumer and even enterprise gear doesn't do that because the majority of the internet is still ipv4. Only the bleeding edge are running v6 on the LAN side intentionally. Another issue is VPN doesn't handle v6 very well either.

It would need to be a custom setup to do what you're thinking of and some traffic would fail unless it gets translated along the way to v4.
 
Based on the comments, I decided I needed to learn more before responding and came across an interesting article. If you do a Google search using the terms “How to route IPv4 via IPv6”, the first listing is for an article by “ungleich network” dated 2020-2-10. If I am reading the article right, a local IPv4 packet with an IPv4 destination address can be routed out an IPv6 port. Am I misunderstanding the article?

I would provide a direct link but I suspect it would be filtered out.
 
In regard to the first link, I am afraid that I am one of the Neanderthals who thinks that NAT and port forwarding will always be useful for a variety of reasons.

As for the second link, that will take a while to digest.

Thanks to both of you for your input.
 
have a real simple newbie question that I do not expect a detailed answer for. All the information I have seen on configuring routers for IPv6 shows both the WAN and LAN sides as using IPv6. Are there routers that will allow you to have a single IPV6 (no IPv4) address on the WAN side and conventional IPv4 private addresses on the LAN side? I suspect I am not seeing anything about such a configuration because there is very good technical reason why that is not possible. If that is the case, I will continue to look for the reason. All I need to know is if that is indeed the case. Thanks

Most routers that support IPv6 on the WAN side - you can control what's happening on the LAN side - if you want IPv4 only getting out, that can be done - IPv6 can be link-local with FE80 addressing.

There's not really a reason to have the LAN on IPv4 only if the WAN is IPv6 - challenge here is that there is inconsistency on how to manage the IPv6 addressing on both the WAN side and LAN side - IETF left a lot of things optional there, and each ISP is doing their own thing.
 
Most routers that support IPv6 on the WAN side - you can control what's happening on the LAN side - if you want IPv4 only getting out, that can be done - IPv6 can be link-local with FE80 addressing.

There's not really a reason to have the LAN on IPv4 only if the WAN is IPv6 - challenge here is that there is inconsistency on how to manage the IPv6 addressing on both the WAN side and LAN side - IETF left a lot of things optional there, and each ISP is doing their own thing.
Thank you for your input. What you say, makes a lot of sense. I suspect I will learn more by actually reading and trying when my ISP actually does change to IPv6. Thanks again.
 

Similar threads

Latest threads

Sign Up For SNBForums Daily Digest

Get an update of what's new every day delivered to your mailbox. Sign up here!
Top