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Forum Discussion

thel1th's avatar
thel1th
Aspirant
Feb 01, 2023

Orbi50 IPv6 OpenVPN accessible?

Dear community,   since I have a new fiber broadband access to the internet I did not try to use my OpenVPN from the Orbi anymore, because the new ISP only provides my router an IPv6 adresses with ...
CrimpOn's avatar
CrimpOn
Guru - Experienced User
Feb 02, 2023
thel1th wrote:

since I have a new fiber broadband access to the internet I did not try to use my OpenVPN from the Orbi anymore, because the new ISP only provides my router an IPv6 adresses with a dual stack light connection.

This situation is "a new one" for me.  The way I read Dual Stack Lite, it appears that the Internet Service Provider assigns a private IP to the customer router, which is entirely unaware that anything is going on at all.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv6_transition_mechanism Thus it is impossible for anything on the internet to connect to the router using IPv4. (Cannot reach a private IP address across the internet.)

 

I wonder if it is worth looking at installing OpenVPN Server on a local computer (not the router).

OpenVPN seems to have a method to support IPv6 on both the host and client side: https://community.openvpn.net/openvpn/wiki/IPv6 

 

 

CrimpOn's avatar
CrimpOn
Guru - Experienced User
Feb 07, 2023

Sorry to take so long.....  If you've already solved the problem, I'd like to know how you did it.

 

IPv6 is a "learning opportunity" for me.  From what I have picked up so far, it appears that placing the Orbi into IPv6 Passthrough mode should enable connections from the internet directly to specific devices on the LAN.  Before investing too much time in this direction*, I wonder if you could share some aspects of the goal:

  • Do the devices that you want to reach on the LAN have public IPv6 addresses?
    If they do, then my impression is that connections can be made directly to each device without involving a VPN.
  • Are the devices secure enough to tolerate exposure to the internet?  With IPv6 addresses being 8 segments of FFFF (about 3.40+38 individual possibilities), it would seem that brute force searches of IPv6 address space are unlikely.  If the open port is secured with a strong password or other type of authentication, even knowing the IPv6 address would not guarantee access.
  • While it appears my Spectrum connection supports IPv6 Passthrough, I have no experience with Dual Stack - Lite.  Does it also support direct access to Public IPv6 addresses?

* Have considered downloading OpenVPN for Windows, configuring it for IPv6, and "seeing what happens" when I connect to this version of OpenVPN rather than the neutered version on the Orbi.