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wongabuyesterday at 8:34 AM4 repliesview on HN

There is no working solution to ipv6 dual WAN failover, 30 years later... A critical design flaw that was simply ignored by the designers despite being used in almost any SME network.

inb4 no you can't have all lan devices have multiple ipv6 addresses and choose for themselves, typically 1 WAN is cheap and the second WAN is expensive/slow and should be used only for WAN1 failover

Inb4 no you can't just advertise new RA, devices on lan can takes minutes to update.

On ipv4, NAT+changing route on router just works, 1-2 seconds failover.


Replies

icedchaiyesterday at 10:27 AM

The actual solution is network prefix translation. You effectively NAT the primary network when failed over to the secondary. See https://docs.netgate.com/pfsense/en/latest/recipes/multiwan-... for an example.

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yjftsjthsd-hyesterday at 9:04 PM

Can you just NAT66?

JackSlateuryesterday at 9:29 PM

Pretty sure BGP exists. NAT, also.

mrsssnakeyesterday at 10:10 AM

IPv4 has exact same problem, the NAT is working here because devices does not actually have proper Internet connection, all connections are terminated on NAT and reassembled after.

Actual solution could be extending TCP and UDP or make a new transport layer procotol that handles changing addresses, similar to what QUIC do. But we cannot do it exactly because things like NATs existing, thus QUIC build was build on ossificated UDP. Imagine if instead of IP+port a connection use unique per-connection hash to persist IP addreses changing. No more trying fighting to keep the IP the same.

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