Not for any particular reason, except that I was cleaning some files from my computer’s desktop and found a link to my ISP’s IPv6 addressing page, I decided to spend too long playing with my routers and computers to get IPv6 working in some form on my home network.

It started with some frustration on the ISP’s horrible website. For dumb reasons (that I could help them fix in no time, I’m sure), when you go from the account bits to the shop bits, it completely forgets who you are. Even logging into the shop bits, which is the same set of credentials as the account bits, you can’t get to where they tried to direct you in the first place.

The first frustration is the good old loyalty screw they give you. As you remain a customer for a while, their introductory rates go away and you end up paying way more than necessary. I’ll reach out later to get that adjusted, again.

Looking at my Internet, of course I do have static IPs. From that fact, they encourage me to use IPv6rd, so, whatever. To do this, though, their site recommends buying a new modem. Clicking on that link gets you into a circle from bad cookie hell, and I can’t get from “order a modem” to ordering a modem on their site. On a different IPv6 page, there’s a link to a compatibility page, on which my modem is listed as compatible, and from there links to some poorly written how-to.

This is where I struggled before. They want to give you a /64, which is a lot, but it’s also the base for a LAN. I have a better router, with a better firewall, and a faster and more secure WiFi, that also has a static address. There’s no information, and (last time I did it) no knowledge from their chat bot or service people, to help. So I winged it and went with the basics. Clicking on the IPv6rd option in the router settings took away all of the noisy fields that required unknown input. Poof, internet. Then to my “better router.”

The documentation for my router suggests that if you’ve got a static IP on the WAN port, that you’ll also want a static IPv6 configuration. This always stung me and traffic wouldn’t route. I didn’t have this problem way back when, as I was using Hurricane Electric’s Tunnel Broker, to tunnel via IPv4 to their IPv6 gateway. Since my ISPs have been saying it’s available, I want raw IPv6. Plus my new ISP doesn’t forward the IPv6 tunnel packets, so that broke anyway.

I decided to wing it and leverage the “pass through” option that my router has. It seems essentially that my router intelligently passes the IPv6 management to the upstream (ISP’s) router. It looks like the computers on the inside of my LAN get IPv6 addresses from the ISP router LAN. Kinda neat, and it works.

Now I’m going to tinker with some static addresses out of the same range, and maybe some 2002::/16 addresses, which are straight IPv4 translated addresses, to my other static IP servers. That I struggled with, too, because you end up with like a /48 network at that host, then. That might be great for changing my router (which has an IPv4 static IP, too), and then properly networking inside differently than outside.

I’ve also got to work on intrusion detection, and getting those tools to behave. It’s a little bit of an onion, as once you start, you need to finish.