Wizarth's Blog

Six months ago, I moved house. The housemates I moved in with had already set up an internet connection, so I put “I'll get my site working again at some point” on the back-burner.

After a while, I get a round-tuit and found out the ISP we were using was using CG-NAT – i.e. IPv4 port forwarding was no longer a useful way of self hosting. And honestly, I didn't really mind that. It's been Time To Move On for IPv4 for a long time now, and this was the push to get on the IPv6 bandwagon.

Unfortunately, I found out a combination of factors was getting in the way of self hosting on IPv6 for me. The ISP we were using was handing out IPv6 addresses, but the router did was specific to the ISP (Optus 5G). After increasingly degraded service was followed by the router completely dying, I switched ISP to Launtel (who I'm very happy with), and switched to using the NBN connection using the router I'd picked up a few years ago.

Unfortunately, said router happily supported IPv6, but gave zero options for configuring the firewall. So while my server was given a globally reachable IPv6 address, and could communicate with it, no incoming connections were allowed.

Fortunately, when I purchased the router, I'd made sure it was one OpenWRT would work with. Today I took the time to install OpenWRT on the router, and set up the firewall to allow IPv6 to reach my server. And here we are!