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loevborgtoday at 7:36 AM1 replyview on HN

Sometimes TCP/IP is a leaky abstraction, and recently ipv6 peeked through in two separate instances:

- In a cafe wifi, I had partial connectivity. For some reason my wifi interface had an ipv6 address but no ipv4 address. As a result, some sites worked just fine but github.com (which is, incredibly, ipv4-only) didn't

- I created a ipv6-only hetzner server (because it's 2026) but ended up giving up and bought a ipv6 address because lack of ipv4 access caused too many headaches. Docker didn't work with default settings (I had to switch to host networking) and package managers fail or just hang when there's no route to the host. All of which is hard to debug and gets in your way


Replies

pastagetoday at 8:01 AM

You can solve this issue if you have one server with ipv6/ipv4 you can run NAT with Jool and connect ipv6 only servers to that. Like Android does.

I wish hosting providers would give you a local routed ipv4 on ipv6 servers with a default NAT server. It is not that expensive I move 10Gbps "easily" and they could charge for that traffic.

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