Recently, there was a Mastodon post from [nixCraft] challenging people to drop their NAT routers for the month of November and use only IPv6. What would it be like to experience “No NAT November?” [Alex Haydock] decided to find out.

What did he learn? You’d imagine he’d either wholeheartedly embrace IPv6 or stagger back in and warn everyone not to mess with their configuration. Instead, he recommends you go IPv6 mostly. He notes he is only talking about a home network, not necessarily networks for a big company or an Internet carrier. That’s a different topic.

IPv6 has been around since 1998, but it has been slow to catch on. However, OS support seems universal at this point. [Alex] was able to easily switch on IPv6 only using Windows, macOS, and several Linux flavors. He didn’t use any Android devices, but they should be OK. His iOS phones were fine.

Where he did have problems was with embedded devices like the Nintendo Switch and a Steam Deck — surprising, since the Steam Deck uses Linux. Actually, the Steam device does support IPV6, it just thinks that if it doesn’t have an IPv4 network, the network must be down.

Some home networking gear also required IPv4 addresses to use their management interfaces. That’s especially funny since the devices clearly know about IPv6. They just don’t serve web pages over their IPv6 address.

Unfortunately, there are many websites that do not have IPV6 servers. That’s not as rare as you might think and [Alex] points out offenders like GitHub, Reddit, Discord, and Steam. No IPv4, no access to those and many other sites.

So despite being No NAT November, it was necessary to set up a NAT64 gateway to read IPv4-only websites. However, unlike normal IPv4 NAT (NAT44), you can use a NAT64 gateway anywhere on the network. [Alex’s] ISP hosts a NAT64 and DNS64 instance and that solved his problem.

The post goes on about other specific cases — if you’ve ever even thought about IPv6, it is worth a read. Switching over? Probably not yet, but as [Alex] points out, with a little work and perseverance, it is possible.

In addition to our earlier coverage of why IPv6 isn’t more popular, we’ve also made the arguments about why it should be.

hackaday.com/2024/12/03/a-mont…