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I'm hosting some things from my home network and my ISP doesn't provide me with an IPv4 address. Not with a way to port forward to it anyway.

I've got my servers running using IPv6 and everything works great, until I had to share things with the 60+% of the world who don't have IPv6 yet.

How can I make my website and servers accessible to everybody? How can I synthesize having a dual stack DNS solution while only being able to use IPv6? I'm using CloudFlare as my DNS in case it matters.

P.S. I'm aware of DNS64 but I don't think that's what I'm looking for right? I also did a tiny bit of research into DNS46 but the truth is I don't understand it at all.

Noud Zandbergen
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  • We don't support home networking or hosting services at home. – Michael Hampton Dec 17 '20 at 03:01
  • Do you also not support 17 year olds exploring hosting possibilities for fun projects with a raspberry pi whilst keeping safety in mind, in order to save quite a bit of money? I mean I would go with a better option but I don't see that many atm. – Noud Zandbergen Dec 17 '20 at 05:21
  • Put Cloudflare in front of your server. People can reach them over both IPv4 and IPv6, and they can reach you over IPv6. – Sander Steffann Dec 17 '20 at 08:04
  • @SanderSteffann Oehh I was thinking of that. I'll have to look into how it's done more because I tried a few things and they didn't seem to work. Do you reckon this is related? https://community.cloudflare.com/t/ipv4-or-ipv6-to-cloudflare-ipv6-only-to-origin/167747 – Noud Zandbergen Dec 17 '20 at 15:53
  • Yep, that's it exactly – Sander Steffann Jan 08 '21 at 14:47

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DNS only translates names to IP addresses. It can't solve a v4 vs v6 problem on it's own.

DNS64 is used in conjunction with stateful NAT64, to allow v6-only clients to access v4-only servers. A /96 of v6 space is allocated to the NAT64 gateway. This provides enough IPv6 addresses to represent the whole IPv4 internet. The DNS64 then provides a mapping from DNS names to IPv6 addresses in the block allocated to the NAT64.

The problem with trying to do the opposite should be obvious, V6 addresses are big, V4 addresses are small. So you can map all of v4 space with a tiny corner of v6 space but you can't do the converse.

If all your services are http/https, then you can use a reverse proxy or content distribution network, to distribute the traffic based on application level metadata. For services other than http/https that run over modern versions of tls, you can also use the "server name indication" headers to distribute traffic, though it may be harder to find an operator that will do this. If your servers run other protocols then it is likely that dedicated v4 IPs will be needed, which will obviously cost more.

Peter Green
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