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Álvaro Ramírez
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Álvaro Ramírez

06 November 2018 Working with vultr's ipv6-only instances

Having recently read Your Money or Your Life, I've been cutting down on personal expenses wherever possible. Specially recurring expenses which include monthly charges from VPS hosting. Let's reduce those charges…

My VPS needs are fairly small (mostly hobby and tinkering). Vultr† has a plan for $2.50/month (not seen anything cheaper). The caveat for the price, you get ipv6 access only (ie. 0000:1111:2222:3333:4444:5555:6666:7777:8888).

So far so good, but my ISP doesn't yet support ipv6:

$ ping6 0000:1111:2222:3333:4444:5555:6666:7777:8888
$ ping6: UDP connect: No route to host

Fortunately, we can still work with ipv6 by using a tunnel (TIL about Hurricane Electric's tunnel broker). After signing up and creating a tunnel, they conveniently show you "Example Configurations" from the "Tunnel Details" menu. In my case, macOS:

ifconfig gif0 create
ifconfig gif0 tunnel <ipv4 client broker IP or DCHP internal IP> <ipv4 server IP>
ifconfig gif0 inet6 <ipv6 client broker IP> <ipv6 server IP> prefixlen 128
route -n add -inet6 default <ipv6 server IP>

Note: If behind router, use the DHCP internal IP.

After configuring with ifconfig, all is good. Yay!

$ ping6 0000:1111:2222:3333:4444:5555:6666:7777:8888
PING6(56=40+8+8 bytes) 2001:111:22:aaa::2 --> 0000:1111:2222:3333:4444:5555:6666:7777:8888
16 bytes from 0000:1111:2222:3333:4444:5555:6666:7777:8888, icmp_seq=0 hlim=52 time=270.019 ms
16 bytes from 0000:1111:2222:3333:4444:5555:6666:7777:8888, icmp_seq=1 hlim=52 time=290.834 ms
16 bytes from 0000:1111:2222:3333:4444:5555:6666:7777:8888, icmp_seq=2 hlim=52 time=311.960 ms
16 bytes from 0000:1111:2222:3333:4444:5555:6666:7777:8888, icmp_seq=3 hlim=52 time=330.902 ms

I'm an ipv6 noob. I mostly need ssh access. My typical usages need small tweaks.

For ssh:

ssh -6 username@0000:1111:2222:3333:4444:5555:6666:7777:8888

For scp:

scp -6 file.txt username@\[0000:1111:2222:3333:4444:5555:6666:7777:8888\]:/remote/dir/

† I get $10 credit if you use this affiliate link. Thank you.