Multihoming IPv6

I am lucky, I have an IPv6 PI block and announcements via multiple transit providers, but most people don't have that and rely on somewhat more flaky DSL lines and the like.

If you have two providers for IPv6 you end up with two separate PA public IPv6 blocks, which is exactly what one of our customers ended up with. A /60 from us and a /60 from someone else. Well, technically, from A&A he had a /48, but was only using /60.

He wanted some higher availability networking, so went for "prefix mapping" RFC6296. Now, this does seem a lot like IPv6 NAT, I agree, but not really and almost none of the usual NAT issues.

Basically he maps the low bits of the /60 from each provider incoming (68 bits of host) on to a local FD01::/60 block for machines on his LAN. He can have DNS for each device/IP on the LAN pointing to both the external IP blocks. No change of source IP, nor ports, just mapping the IPv6 space.

For outgoing he can map to a preferred link, or even randomly or randomly with a bias, mapping the host part of the FD01::/60 to each of the external public IPv6 blocks, and can even make that mapping apply depending on whether the PPP link in question is up or down!

So for outgoing, one link down, just works. For incoming, one link down means things trying both IPs from DNS, which is quite common these days in many protocols.

How has he done that? Well, he asked on irc if FireBrick do it, and the answer was no! We had something similar for IPv4 only on the older FB105 model but not on current FireBricks.

I ended up making him wait a whole 48 hours before I did an new alpha release that does this. The reason was I was waiting to issue a stable release with all the recent ACME code first. No last minute changes for a new feature like this - a stable release needs to be, err, stable.

Outstanding support from @firebrickltd, after what if conversions with @TheRealRevK of @aaisp on IRC Re: NPTv6 fast forward 48 hours (over a weekend...) and an alpha firmware has been shipped with the feature. Such wonderful devices, and such wonderful support #firebrick4life

— Russell Clare (@virtubean) 4 June 2018

— Russell Clare (@virtubean) 4 June 2018

But, it was a good idea, a good feature, restored some of the old FB105 features for block mapped addresses, and so I have issued it as an alpha now. My only thought now is if I should have some way to do random IP mapping one day... Hmmm...

Obvious the solution is more complex than the IPv4 only old FB105 FireBricks, as we not only allow IPv6 prefix mapping of any size, but also IPv4 prefix and range mapping, and IPv4 to IPv6 as well as IPv6 to IPv4 mapping. You can use this to make a NAT64 mapping engine putting all of IPv4 space in an IPv6 /96 if you want. Very flexible.

Have fun if you try the latest alpha, and obviously in a few weeks it will be in a general release.