Building a Mostly IPv6 Only Home Network

Summary

I wanted to switch my home network to IPv6 only design. However the reality is still that there are lot of devices today that only support IPv4 and large parts of Internet are still IPv4 only. Because of this, many networks still deploy dual stack everywhere. However, I believe there is a case to be made for deploying IPv6 only in your network. Technologies like NAT64, DNS64 and 464XLAT make it possible for IPv6 only networks to access IPv4 services through translation. In this post I explore these technologies and the practical aspects of designing such a IPv6 only home network. Getting a /48 over dedicated tunnel My upstream Telus gives me multiple /64s using DHCP-PD. However the issue is that these are dynamic prefixes with a 10 minute lease timer. So if I turn off my router for more than that, there is good chance that the prefix could change. I wanted static prefix for my LAN and I also wanted more prefixes that I could then delegate to other things like Docker and VPN. So I decided to use Free Range Cloud service provider to lease a /48, which cost me around C$10/year. I also used their tunnel service to then route this over to me. They have a POP in Vancouver, Canada and since I am in Kelowna, this is around 15 ms of latency away. However since most traffic flows through Vancouver anyways, this didn’t add much in terms of latency in reality. Setting up Wireguard for tunnel was simple I added the Wireguard details on OPNSense firewall and it started working. I decided to use IPv6 on tunnel and got a IPv6 address from WAN to connect from. This way I am not reliant on IPv4 for connectivity and don’t need to worry about MTU and fragmentation and can just let IPv6 PMTU take care of it. PBR on OPNSense for LAN traffic I then added a simple Policy Based Routing(PBR) rule on LAN interface to send traffic through the tunnel. Since there is no rdns setup, I used All Knowing DNS Server to setup rdns for the IP block. I have talked about how to set this up in this post. ...