In reply to a post by tdw42:

From the information they provide:

Where did you find that info? Or are you extrapolating from the addresses?

I can only find 'consumer' info on the Zen help pages, nothing about IPv6. I do now know my IPv6 address, its in the account section. And I've discovered my Mac is using IPv6 on the LAN!

So what address do you need to find my router? Is it the PD part? Can I use that as I do my IPv4 address? Is that what I'd add to my domain's public DNS entry for example?

No that's wrong isn't it. Zen describe the PD as LAN and ND as WAN. So I need to add the longer ND /64 address to my DNS?

In reply to a post by Woolwich:

In reply to a post by tdw42:

From the information they provide:

Where did you find that info? Or are you extrapolating from the addresses?

When I migrated to Zen last year they were still not enabling IPv6 by default, that info was in the reply to me requesting it to be enabled.

Zen describe the PD as LAN and ND as WAN. So I need to add the longer ND /64 address to my DNS?

The /48 PD is simply a routed block of addresses which can be obtained by the router with DHCPv6-PD.
The /64 ND is used to construct the globally unique WAN address. The underlying mechanisms for IPv6 addressing are different to IPv4, there is no ARP or DHCP-provided gateway - instead there is Neighbour Discovery (ND) which comprises a number of ICMPv6 message types, the important ones in this case are Router Solicitation (RS) and Router Advertisment (RA).

The RA message from the ISP provides the /64 network (as shown in the email or control panel), this is combined with a subnet address from the router to generate the 128-bit address. There are plenty of articles on SLAAC and converting EUI-48 MAC addresses to EUI-64 to form the subnet part of the address.

For example, with a PD of 2001:DB8:A1B2:C3D4::/64 and a WAN port MAC address of 00:11:22:33:44:55 the IPv6 address would be 2001:DB8:A1B2:C3D4:211:22FF:FE33:4455 - this would be what you add to DNS as an AAAA record for the router itself.

Depends what you want to use the public DNS entry for
is it for when remotely connecting to a service running on the router itself or remotely connecting to the Mac on the LAN?

For connections from inside the LAN Your Mac will already have a private DNS entry on the Fritzbox! e.g.
hostname.fritz.box

and be discoverable by mDNS at
hostname.local

Edited by prlzx (Fri 02-Jun-23 14:23:04)

Operating system prefix routing prefers IPv6, so most software will try IPv6 first and fallback to IPv4. This is configurable.

However Chrome (and anything based on Chrome) behaves differently, they implemented happy eyeballs RFC, they will try both stacks at once, and use the one that responds first, this can give the impression of randomness or constant switching between the two stack's.

Chrome at this time has no way to control this behaviour. Firefox does honour the OS prefix table though.

Edited by Chrysalis (Fri 02-Jun-23 15:28:16)

In reply to a post by prlzx:

Depends what you want to use the public DNS entry for

Connecting to server running on the LAN from the WAN. Which I do now using IPv4 address and port forwarding on the FritzBox.

But also, now you mention it. I also access the Server from my Mac on the LAN using the server's LAN address - 192.168.178.123. Easy to remember. How would I do that with IPv6 on the LAN? Not that I think its needed, IPv4 ain't dead yet and certainly not on private LANs.

In reply to a post by Woolwich:

In reply to a post by prlzx:

Depends what you want to use the public DNS entry for

Connecting to server running on the LAN from the WAN. Which I do now using IPv4 address and port forwarding on the FritzBox.

But also, now you mention it. I also access the Server from my Mac on the LAN using the server's LAN address - 192.168.178.123. Easy to remember. How would I do that with IPv6 on the LAN? Not that I think its needed, IPv4 ain't dead yet and certainly not on private LANs.

On the LAN as per previous post you access it by name and DNS takes care of finding the IP - you don't need to memorise the addresses.
I'm a big fan of properly populated DNS and conversely, misconfigured DNS makes a bunch of things that should just work look broken.

If you are using the Zen-supplied Fritz!box and you want to allow something to reach the Mac from the outside you just allow that in the Permit Access section. The IPv6 and IPv4 addresses will be listed alongside the hostname and MAC address of the server.

Edited by prlzx (Fri 02-Jun-23 20:09:49)

In reply to a post by candlerb:

the plugin "IPvFoo"

Thanks for mentioning that- I've long wanted something that would tell me whether I'm connecting to a site over IPv4 or v6, if only out of curiosity!

It does the job beautifully