Hi I'm not an expert on networks and that's the reason why I'm posting this.

My problem is that I have an old device (mediacenter box) that does not supports IPv6 to connect to Internet. Until now, it was working without problems because my ISP was using IPv4, but now they started migration to IPv6.

Is there any way to allow this device connect to Internet again using IPv6?

I know that IPv6 is not compatible with IPv4 but I'm wondering if it's possible to setup a tunnel or gateway to do it.

  • You should either accept the answer, or you can provide and accept your own answer, otherwise the question will keep popping up forever, looking for an answer. – Ron Maupin Dec 12 '17 at 14:53

If you can configure a proxy server on the media center then it might be possible. The media center can connect to the proxy using IPv4, and if you have a dual stack proxy server that can do both IPv4 and IPv6 then that will allow the media center to connect to IPv6 services.

For running a proxy server there are lots of options, such as Squid, Apache and many others. You can run them on anything from a Raspberry Pi to a heavy server.

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  • Hi Sander, thank you for your answer.FInally I found a workaround using tethering and opening a wifi hotspot on my Android phone. – David Nov 25 '17 at 12:38

There are two scenarios to consider.

  1. An IPv4 only device accessing resources on the IPv4 Internet through an IPv6 access network.
  2. An IPv4 only device accessing resources on the IPv6 Internet.

There are a number of soloutions to scenario 1.

  1. 464xlat, the ISP runs a NAT64 and then you locally run a NAT46. Many ISPs are likely to implement the NAT46 on their home gateway devices, but if they don't then you can implement one yourself easilly enough. I expect this is what the andriod phone you mention in a comment on Sanders answer is doing.
  2. DS-lite, an automatic tunneling based approach, usually implemented by the ISP. This is really only an option if your ISP chooses to use it.
  3. Use a conventional VPN implemented with software that allows the VPN to run over IPv6.

Scenario 2 is trickier. A proxy is an option if the client supports it, a network-level soloution is theoretically possible but it's messy involving stateful DNS manipulation and carrying a risk of client traffic being sent to the wrong server, either because the state tables are reset by an outage, because the client continues using an IP after a state table entry ages out or because the client moves to a different network. I haven't seen anyone implement such a soloution.

For the time being we are mostly worried about scenario 1. Nearly all public resources are still available on the IPv4 Internet.

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