Reach the ipv6 website via ipv4

ipv4ipv6webserver

At my researching time, I found these relevant topics: access ipv6 website over ipv4 network and IPv6 Webserver reachable for IPv4 only Clients.

My situation: I have a public ipv6 and a local ipv4 at home. I tried hard to forward a port, but it looks like I'm into a NAT, behind another NAT (?).
So I tried to reach my ipv6 address outside my LAN and I got success, so then I set a simple apache webserver on a raspberry pi (who has an ipv6 too) and expose it to different DNS providers: dioniso.ddns.net, dioniso.crabdancer.com and dioniso.dynv6.net.

So, I can access these websites only in PCs that have ipv6 or ipv4 with tunneling.

The thing is, how ipv4 could reach this website? Some topics are saying that I need a proxy to "translate" ipv6-ipv4. Is it really necessary? If yes, where can I found a provider to do that?

Could someone give me some tips here? I'm pretty lost.

Best Answer

Yes, if your webserver has only IPv6 and the visitor has only IPv4 then they will not be able to communicate. You'd need a translator that has access to both IPv4 and IPv6 somewhere.

There are roughly two ways to translate:

  • Reverse proxy
  • SIIT-DC

Facebook uses SIIT-DC in their server farms. They use IPv6 internally and use SIIT-DC to translate their incoming IPv4 traffic to IPv6. I don't know of any providers that offer such a service for home use though.

What you could do is to rent a virtual private server with both IPv4 and IPv6 somewhere and set up a reverse proxy on it. Then visitors can contact the server over IPv4, and the server can contact your webserver over IPv6. I have done this in the past with Apache, Nginx and haproxy. The configuration is not too difficult, but you do need to have a server that you can run it on...

I wrote an article on options for making IPv4 content accessible over IPv6. What you need is basically the reverse: making IPv6 content accessible over IPv4. The concept is the same though.

A simple haproxy config:

listen webserver1
    bind 192.0.2.1:80
    mode tcp
    server webserver1 2001:db8:abc:123::cafe:80
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