As you could have read, I joined the ownClouds PiDrive effort. I like the idea and we were brainstorming on the mailing list regarding what can we do. One notion really popped out. If you have ownCloud at home, you might be interested in reaching your home cloud from anywhere you go. And if you don’t have public IPv4 or you don’t want to forward public ports from the router, you might be interested in getting IPv6 for you home cloud. It can be pretty easy. Both on your home cloud and your notebook. I would like to talk about few options I considered and how and which I decided to integrate them (also into ownCloud app that you can use anywhere).
Overview of options
Native IPv6
You might be lucky and get IPv6 segment directly from your Internet provider. I know mine does offer it. But I also know that quite some providers are trying to fight inevitable future and keep postponing IPv6 deployment. On the other hand, I heard that there are some providers that migrated fully to IPv6 and no longer offer IPv4, just NAT64. If you have native IPv6, you probably know about it and if your router is correctly setup, your home NAS as well as your other computers will get it automatically. So for those lucky ones, my app will just detect IPv6 and display the address you can use to connect to your cloud.
6to4
Kinda nice way to get IPv6, but requires public IPv4 and some advanced setup on the device that has this IP. So probably nothing average Joe will do. But if he does and propagate it to his PiDrive, app will detect it and show it.
Tunnel from IPv6 broker
This is quite popular option. You register with some tunnel broker (like HE or SixXS) and they will give you fixed IPv6 address or range of IPv6 address that you can use however you want. You get always the same IP no matter where you are and setup is usually pretty easy, the only tricky part is registration which often requires you to fill in quite some personal details. I was thinking about providing this as an option on PiDrive, but the need to register somewhere and need to choose a broker sounded quite bothersome, so I decided to support mainly the last option I’m going to mention which I consider the most user-friendly. But as in previous case, if you set this up, the app will detect that IP address that you got this way and display it and this option might be added later on as I consider it quite useful.
Teredo
Teredo is I would say the easiest way (from the end-users point of view) how to get IPv6. You just need to run the client on your machine, and it will figure everything out and assign you some IPv6 address that you can use. It works behind NAT and you don’t have to know anything, it will figure out everything – even the closest relay to use. There are some disadvantages. There is an overhead with figuring out everything, the protocol itself has some overhead and on top of that, your IP depends on public IP of your NAT and how it handles your traffic. It also depends on port you were assigned by your NAT, so your IP will likely change with every reboot. But overall I think it is viable solution for end users if used together with some DynDNS service (where you would need to register but mostly with less personal info). I have in my TODO to add option to support DynDNS as well (started working on it already, but really just started, so nothing published yet).
Conclusion
I think making it easy for home users to enable IPv6 on their home cloud and educating people about how to get IPv6 on their other machines is probably the best way to go regarding how to let people have their data available everywhere they go. An I hope the app I’m working on will help to achieve that.