Hey fellow self-hosting lemmoids

Disclaimer: not at all a network specialist

I’m currently setting up a new home server in a network where I’m given GUA IPv6 addresses in a 64 bit subnet (which means, if I understand correctly, that I can set up many devices in my network that are accessible via a fixed IP to the oustide world). Everything works so far, my services are reachable.

Now my problem is, that I need to use the router provided by my ISP, and it’s - big surprise here - crap. The biggest concern for me is that I don’t have fine-grained control over firewall rules. I can only open ports in groups (e.g. “Web”, “All other ports”) and I can only do this network-wide and not for specific IPs.

I’m thinking about getting a second router with a better IPv6 firewall and only use the ISP router as a “modem”. Now I’m not sure how things would play out regarding my GUA addresses. Could a potential second router also assign addresses to devices in that globally routable space directly? Or would I need some sort of NAT? I’ve seen some modern routers with the capability of “pass-through” IPv6 address allocation, but I’m unsure if the firewall of the router would still work in such a configuration.

In IPv4 I used to have a similar setup, where router 1 would just forward all packets for some ports to router 2, which then would decide which device should receive them.

Has any of you experience with a similar setup? And if so, could you even recommend a router?

Many thanks!

  • 2xsaiko
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    23 days ago

    Most computers with (at least) two network interfaces will do. If it’s something too crappy your throughput will be limited by CPU speed but I can’t tell you exact recommendations here. Here’s OPNsense’s hardware recommendations for example, they’re not high at all. Off-the-shelf devices that allow you to do this should probably be fine too.

    I’d put Linux on it and use nftables but BSD PF seems to be very popular for firewalls (OPNsense/pfSense are built on this) which I have never used so consider that too.